The producers of “Cocomelon” listened to your concerns. But Moonbug, the studio behind the popular preschool series, doesn’t buy into the common criticism that its shows are overly stimulating and addictive.
That’s why Moonbug recently announced a partnership with UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers, a nonprofit research center focused on children’s entertainment. As Variety exclusively reported, the center analyzed the company’s policies and practices alongside peer-reviewed research on early childhood learning before developing four core learning principles that will be applied to Cocomelon, Blippi, Little Angel, and more. Mooonbug published these principles on its website on Tuesday, wanting to demonstrate its commitment to healthy and educational content.
“Once you dig into the work that we’re doing, which is very welcome, you can see that our writers care very much about children’s entertainment,” Rich Hickey, Moonbug’s chief creative officer, told Variety. “Many of them are caregivers and parents of young children themselves. There’s nothing we can do if they get a little picky, but we think we’ve been very diligent throughout the process.”
The four principles of navigating real-life moments, modeling positive relationships, promoting learning through play, and telling truly inclusive stories are detailed in a new publication on the Moonbug site, along with explanations of their importance to child development and guidelines for their implementation.
For example, in a section about navigating real-life moments, the site notes that depictions of children brushing their own teeth or choosing their own clothes can help young viewers “establish a routine” and become “more independent.” Below that is a suggestion from CSS to “Minimize distracting or unrelated songs and stories as characters navigate real-life moments.” Because “research shows that preschoolers are easily distracted, and extraneous factors can interfere with their ability to learn lessons.”
Hickey says that for each piece of content created by Moonbug, “it’s always been important to find insights into child development that create hooks and takeaways,” but notes that previously these considerations were done on an episode-by-episode basis rather than being standardized at the company level. “We didn’t have that consistency across all the episodes. This partnership allows us to create an umbrella and be able to say, ‘Hello, at Moonbug, everything we make is guided by these principles.'”
“Cocomelon” is extremely popular as Moonbug’s representative series. The series has the largest audience across YouTube, with over 200 million subscribers, and a growing audience on Netflix. However, it has also attracted many critics who have raised concerns about the series’ rapid editing style, with shots changing every few seconds. In 2022, The New York Times wrote about Moonbug’s fine-grained, data-driven approach to monopolizing children’s attention. In 2024, The New Yorker reported that parents were calling the show “Cocaine Melon” and claiming that their children had become “Cocaine Melon” zombies.
But Hickey and his team are confident in what they’re creating, especially after using CSS. “One of the most gratifying discoveries we had working with this group of experts was that they looked at it and said, ‘That’s not it.’ They were very impressed with the level of detail and the work that we did. It wasn’t a concern for them.”
CSS founder and CEO Dr. Yalda T. Uhls, a former MGM and Sony studio executive and expert in developmental psychology, supports Hickey’s claims, but she understands where Moonbug’s criticisms are coming from. Before working at the studio, she said she had her own concerns about “Cocomelon.”
“When you read the mass media, you think, ‘Well, maybe this isn’t good,'” she says. “And we set up an advisory board of some of the world’s best experts in developmental psychology and communication, and they had the same impression.” “We were all surprised that it wasn’t as bad as the mass media suggested. In fact, we looked at the academic literature to see if there was any research showing that this kind of children’s media is addictive or that rapid reduction has a negative effect on young people, and that’s actually not the case. The data is pretty inconclusive.”
According to Uhls, the CSS team evaluated some of Moonbug’s content against a rubric of research-based metrics on a scale of 0 to 2 points. “There was certainly room for improvement and room to think more systematically about development, but most of the content was a 1. It could be a 2, but it was generally non-zero. And this was before we started working with them.”
Understanding the discourse surrounding “Cocomelon,” Uhls’s position is that parents lack a technical understanding of how their children’s brains respond to what they see, and are reacting based on their own preferences. Addressing this contradiction is part of the aim of promoting new learning principles.
Recalling her own experience as a parent before she began studying child psychology, Uhls says, “When my kids were growing up, I was annoyed by ‘Barney,’ but when I look at it again as someone with a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, there’s actually a lot of good in it. As a parent, if you don’t know what’s developmentally appropriate for your child, you’re going to rely on your instincts. Kids get tired of watching these shows, and the songs can start to feel like, “This can’t be good for my child.” However, research shows that it is actually not harmful. It can have positive results. ”
“We’re very conscious of the time children spend with our songs and stories,” Hickey says. “We take that responsibility seriously, and we want to be more intentional and as transparent as possible to help parents understand the experience their children have while watching our content. I want parents to spend time with the content themselves, see how much learning is packed into each episode, and make their own decisions from there.”
Learn more about Moonbug and CSS learning principles (including academic citations) here.
