Diversity In Children’s Entertainment: Then vs. Now
Do you remember your favourite childhood cartoon? Or the TV show you liked as a tween? Did you know that it could have played a role in shaping who you are today?
The consensus is that TV and other forms of child entertainment can contribute significantly to early development. However, nobody can seem to agree on what educational philosophy determines good children’s entertainment.
In particular, diversity has been a controversial topic this year, with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs in education and beyond hotly debated in political spheres. Amidst these discussions, we must not neglect to analyze diversity in entertainment for America’s most impressionable viewers: children.
Why Diversity Is Needed in Children’s Entertainment
It has been less than a hundred years since the entertainment industry started portraying racial diversity and equality. America was still deep in the Jim Crow era by the time its first children’s television programming was pioneered in the late 1940s with shows like Howdy Doody. It wouldn’t be until the 60s and 70s that there would be meaningful attempts to authentically represent non-white races in mainstream American television.
Diversity in media is, at its core, about variety. We live in a world with people of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, social classes, and more. Without the diversity of the real world reflected in media, children are prone to consciously and subconsciously learn prejudices against certain groups of people. “A child’s mind is a sponge” is not just a cliché saying; it’s a scientifically proven fact. A study from the University of California, Los Angeles showed that children as young as first grade were able to group the faces of animated characters as either “good” or “bad” based on the ideals they picked up from TV shows.
Representation matters because what we see in the media doesn’t just reflect reality – it also shapes it. — Kelly Corcoran, Senior Digital Communications Officer at Action for Children
So when a child only watches TV shows where boys are the heroes and girls are the princesses who need saving, or the main character is white and the sidekick is Black, this messaging shapes their perception of the world. Without diverse characters, stories, and perspectives, children develop biases that may follow them into adulthood. Fortunately, TV shows like Sesame Street have been fighting the battle against singular narratives for decades.
The Sesame Street Philosophy
In 1966, Joan Ganz Cooney carried out a landmark study and compiled The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education, a report which would later become the framework for Sesame Street. Sesame Street is arguably the most beloved American children’s TV show of all time. First aired in 1969, it was the first children’s television program created based on academic research and with the specific aim of educating children, particularly those from low-income households. The show was a collaboration between traditional television creators and researchers, utilizing cognitive and affective educational goals for each episode. Its combination of colorful puppetry, relatable live-action scenes, and fun animation draws in young audiences, and the life lessons within its storylines put it far ahead of its time.
Sesame Street recognized that children needed to see people like them on TV. The titular and fictional Sesame Street neighborhood was based on Harlem, an ethnically diverse neighborhood in New York. Both its human and puppet characters were racially diverse. However, they did not stop at race. Over the decades, the show has platformed marginalized characters of all kinds, including children with disabilities, the homeless, and adoptees, along with their unique stories. Its mass appeal is also in no small part due to its availability on public television, allowing it to reach more children than many other programs can.
Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them. — Malcolm Gladwell, Author
The popularity of Sesame Street helped create a wave of Black-focused television near the turn of the Century. The 1990s are widely considered the Golden Age of Black television. Diversity in representation was present in TV shows like fellow puppet-human mashups Barney and Friends and Cousin Skeeter; live-action series like Nickelodeon’s Kenan and Kel; and cartoons like Hey Arnold! and TheMagic School Bus.
The shift in racial representation was most felt in adult TV shows. Who can forget the iconic classics The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Living Single, Family Matters, In Living Color, Martin, and A Different World? The options were so vast that even teen-specific Black shows like Sister, Sister and Moesha had room to grow.
Diversity in Children’s Entertainment Today
The success of 90s TV spilled over into the early 2000s. Disney debuted its first Black-led shows, including the teen smash hit That’s So Raven and the animated The Proud Family. Since then, there’s been a steady increase in diversity in children’s entertainment. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the number of leads in mainstream children’s TV shows from traditionally underrepresented groups like people of color and the LGBTQ+ community doubled between 2005 and 2019. We have reached the point where diversity isn’t just needed — it’s expected.
Despite this, the level and quality of representation still fluctuates. In the 2010s, the rise of YouTube meant that more and more children relied on online videos for entertainment instead of traditional TV. The downside is the lack of consistency in representation since the Internet, unlike television, has no set industry standard. In 2020, we saw the rise of streaming, a natural progression from the popularity of web-based entertainment. You are now far more likely to see a tablet-wielding preschooler bingeing Cocomelon on Netflix than watching an episode of Sesame Street in the living room. The convenience of streaming has forced us to broaden the traditional concept of “TV”. There is also concern over minorities being included in some productions to simply “tick boxes” without proper attention given to authentic representation.
We still have some way to go. According to the 2024 Hollywood Diversity Report, adults with disabilities, Latino, and Asian actors remained underrepresented among streaming film leads in 2023. On the positive side, Native American and Asian actors received nearly proportionate representation in streaming film leads, while Black, Middle Eastern, and North African actors were overrepresented. However, we must remember that streaming moves faster than TV, and the diversity on cable has not yet reached the levels of diversity online.
Striving for Authentic Representation
Recent political unrest has caused a conservative push against diversity. Despite this, the impact that diverse children’s media has had on society is undeniable, so there’s no reason to stop now. Beyond the number of minorities represented in any given show, we must strive to tell diverse stories that promote empathy and humanity beyond mere box-ticking. It is only then that children can appreciate the beauty of the world for what it is.
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