All through May, PBS KIDS is spotlighting mental health via its "Talk About" shorts.
This last week has seen an avalanche of coverage around Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Yet May is more than springtime flowers and accessibility—it’s also Mental Health Awareness Month. To be sure, mental health is as close to my heart as accessibility and assistive technology. And yes, mental health, tech, and disability intersect.
In commemorating Mental Health Awareness Month, PBS Kids is running episodes of its myriad children’s programming in a concerted effort to heighten awareness among young audiences of their feelings.
For Sara DeWitt, the network’s senior vice president and general manager, she told me in a recent interview the focus on children’s healthy wellbeing stems from an experiment into “how media could help kids learn.” The 24-year PBS veteran, whose purview includes digital development such as games and streaming video, explained it started with the legend himself, Fred Rogers. With his Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the highly-revered host who died two decades ago, helped pioneer the notion that television could have a lasting impact on how to “help kids develop a stronger sense of self, and help recognize their own emotions and how to manage those emotions,” DeWitt said.
DeWitt mentioned the establishment in 1967 of the Public Broadcasting Act, and of Rogers’ subsequent testimony, in which he advocated for the power of TV to relay the “importance of kids, learning how to recognize and name their feelings so they can work through them,” adding Rogers “specifically cited human feelings [such as] anger and ways that kids can learn how to talk through their emotions in order to resolve conflicts” in his comments in front of lawmakers on Capitol Hill in May 1969.
DeWitt continued: “I think this is really rooted in who we are from the very beginning. [We’re] trying to model for kids that feelings are something that, if you can name them, you can then begin to work on how to feel them and manage them, when that’s necessary. We’ve thought about this through the years in a lot of our shows.”
Through programs such as Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, and many more, DeWitt and her team have sought not only to engender proper socio-emotional development in children, but also expose them to arts like music and pre-academic concepts such as colors, shapes, and the alphabet. For this month, the focus is on more abstract skills as teaching children to begin learning about themselves as people. As DeWitt explained, a big driver in honing in on mental health was, of course, the pandemic. In 2021, her team convened a panel of external advisors in an effort to have a discussion about how best they could help navigate the virus-mandated quarantine and its resulting social isolation. “[We wanted to] have a conversation about what we needed to be focused on during this time,” said of the impetus for holding the advisor meetings. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we were about reaching kids and helping to support the the immediate kind of anxiety, then we were really focused on how to support basic skills because so many kids were getting their learning from screens through schools. So, we asked the advisors, ‘What are the things we should be paying attention to?’ and it was almost unanimous they were focused on mental health [and] anxiety. They said, ‘As we move through [the pandemic], this is what kids are really going to need’” in a world changed forever.
To that end, PBS Kids this month has dedicated a sizable chunk of its scheduled programming to numerous shorts designed to reinforce the cruciality of positive mental health in children. As part of its Emmy-winning Talk About series, the network is delivering shorts on such emotionally-wracking topics as the death of a family pet, what to do when you feel scared, and how to navigate life changes such as moving or family and friends getting older. The content is available to stream free of charge on all places where PBS Kids is available, whether on the web or via apps on platforms like tvOS, Google TV, Roku, and others.
"Arthur" creator Marc Brown has contributed content for promoting mental health awareness.
Among the beloved participating is everyone’s favorite aardvark, Arthur.
Arthur creator Marc Brown explained to me in a recent interview conducted over videoconference Arthur came to be as a bedtime story for his son. Brown shared an anecdote about a time several years ago, when a reporter in Chicago asked him to distill Arthur in a few words. “I was thinking, ’Okay, well, Arthur is an 8-year-old old aardvark who’s navigating the puddles of life,’” he said. “And he doesn’t always do it with great wisdom or skill, like any 8-year-old—sometimes, he needs the help of his friends and family to get through certain situations [in his life].”
Brown continued: “I think that [aspect of humanity] makes Arthur very relatable, and I think that kids trust Arthur. I think they look at Arthur to see how he solves problems and deals with different issues. That’s what we’re trying to do with these digital shorts we’ve made for PBS.”
Arthur began its 25th and final season in January of last year. The series, which is shown in 80 countries worldwide, has won seven Emmy Awards and a Peabody. The books, which begat the show, have sold almost 70 million copies since the first edition was published back in 1976.
Brown reiterated many of DeWitt’s beliefs around teaching children with humor and whimsy and empathy; in short, make the educational experience feel not like a chore, but a fun activity. For Brown, his agenda is interleaving an entertaining story around more hardcore, grown up narratives like problem-solving or grieving the loss of a beloved friend or family member. “I know my goal is to make kids more successful through the [Arthur] books and television programs,” he said.
When asked if he ever reflects upon Arthur’s phenomenal popularity, Brown conceded rather modestly the journey has been “has been quite amazing” for him to behold. The ride has been “certainly nothing I ever expected,” he said. Looking towards the future, Brown is bullish on the wave of quality television for children, saying he believes we’re amidst “a real renaissance of children’s literature” and marvels at the thematic complexity of the stories told today. In addition, Brown briefly teased an as-yet-unannounced new project he has in the pipeline, but declined to elaborate on specifics regarding what’s to come with his mystery work.
Broadly speaking, both DeWitt and Brown conveyed great confidence in children’s ability to not merely be entertained by this content, but to be intellectually sophisticated enough to absorb and process the lessons being instilled into them. Brown said children are “very capable,” saying children’s programming is, like other forms of media, a reflection of life. He attributes much of the visceral response to Arthur to just that reality—that children are seeing a fictional character going through some very non-fictional experiences and it resonates with them. “[The storytelling is] reflecting what kids need right now to understand what’s happening in the world around them,” he said of current children’s television.
For her part, DeWitt said the goal for her and her team is simple: keep making more and keep making it as organic as possible. She caveated, however, putting out high-quality, resonant programming for kids doesn’t necessarily require a special episode or a special month like this one. It’s possible to good work in between too. “We can weave it [messaging] into all of these stories that are about everyday kid’s life,” she said. “[We can] help them see there’s a broad variety of strategies that they can take to calm themselves down when they’re feeling anxious; they can take a deep breath, they can wiggle it out, they can hold a [stuffed animal], they can talk to someone, they can go for a walk in nature, they can write or draw or they can make cookies. All these different things that can just be incorporated into the stories of our shows. I think that’s what we’d love to see happen [in the future].”
Brown ended our conversation by sharing a quote from British poet and novelist Walter de la Mare. He said, according to Brown, “I know well that only the rarest kind of best can be good enough for the young.” It’s a sentiment Brown told me he literally keeps with him every day, telling me it helps him stay grounded and remember why he does what he does.
“I know it’s a high bar and [I] don’t always reach it,” he said. “But it’s important that all of us who work for kids and deliver programming and literature [to always try to] keep that bar as high as we can.”
