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Comment by zagrebian | Hacker News Reader

They should do a study to test if letting babies watch a show like Last Airbender instead of Teletubbies has a positive effect.

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Perhaps because they were highly, highly experimental, the early little kids' edutainment shows, like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, just struck me as much better because they didn't insult children's intelligence, spoke to them as full persons, and had relatively rich and complex imagery, music, story, and humor. Which is why they're so watchable and beloved by adults.

And then Elmo happened and then Barney happened, and things have been on kind of a downhill slide into brightly colored, C-major MIDI music Cocomelon happyland.

Cocomelon songs give me some sort of whole-body repulsion if it comes on on shuffle in the car.

Classics that sound great sung by Raffi, Ella Jenkins and even Caspar Babypants are some sort of ear mush when done by Cocomelon, Kidz Bop et al.

Cocomelon are all sung in this weird smug condescending tone. It's really unpleasant.

Compare with Pokémon Kids TV, which sounds really cheerful, and you can hear the singer is really enjoying themselves. Also mostly the same classic children songs, but so much more enjoyable to listen to.

The generic midi versus funny experimental instrumentation play a part too.

Mister Rogers had an excellent jazz pianist doing all the music live in studio throughout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Costa

Real talk though. Kids and babies aren't stupid. So if you take the time to explain things, they pick up on more than you would believe.

Where many people go wrong is that they assume little kids are stupid instead of understanding that they lack context.

Yeah it seems to me like a human bias against ignorance. We have this notion that if people that don't know the knowledge that we know they must be dumb because, "everybody knows ____".

Kids are literally just the definition of inexperienced.

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