On November 10th, Sesame Street celebrated its 40th anniversary. It was one of the first television programs for children which had educational aims. Indeed it’s original, intended, audience was disadvantaged children. It was initiated as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and the effort to find ways to raise the educational level of children who were traditionally doing poorly in school. The set for the early Sesame Street reproduced the street of an inner city neighborhood with a grimy but magical look. In keeping with this theme Mr. Fix its shop was a cluttered mess with ailing toasters in the window.

Although the primary aim of the show was to help inner city children succeed academically, it also tried to teach moral lessons and to bring children to understand that learning can be fun. But from our present perspective, some of the characters and episodes were far from being politically correct. Cookie Monster, for example, ate just about everything in sight, and some things that would not be in sight today, like a typewriter. He was always thinking about food and was not particular about eating anything that was available. Today, thanks to our concern about childhood obesity and the bad example Cookie Monster might set, he has set about eating a more nutritious diet and now recognizes that cookies are a “Sometimes” food.

The characters have been softened just as the sets have been cleaned up, there are no more garbage cans or sketches in which a real man, not a puppet, invites a girl into his house for milk and cookies. While these changes make sense in terms of today’s climate, they also take away from some of the charm of the older shows. I always thought that the older shows were too fast paced for younger children for whom I thought Mr. Roger’s provided a more welcoming and less frenetic fantasy world. Today’s Sesame Street is slower paced and a little less busy than in the past.

Research has shown that middle income children who watch Sesame Street do better academically, when compared with children who watch more action shows like GI Joe, SpongeBob SquarePants among many others... Yet it is not clear that Sesame Street has had the same effect with its target audience, inner city children. Today Sesame Street has to compete with many other programs targeted to children, but it continues to be written with the collaboration of psychologists and educators to ensure that the material is developmentally appropriate. It also is still very thoughtful about the messages it sends to children. In that regard it remains one of the best of the current programs for children.