Cocomelon and the commodification of children's media

By: Foyinkemi Olalere

John Green’s book The Anthroposcene Reviewed consists of a series of essays where Green reviews items or concepts in the anthroposcene, a world in which humans dominate. He connects the human inventions to their cultural impact and net-benefit (or lack thereof), concluding each of his essays with a rating of each topic/item from 1 to 5 stars. My article exploring YouTube's "Cocomelon" follows that format. 

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​When my parents had me in 2009, they weren’t exactly sure what to do with their firstborn when it came to screen time. Coming from Nigeria, where Internet Cafés were a novelty, they couldn’t exactly understand, nor afford, the hype around smartphones. As a matter of fact, my mother was still using a flip phone well into the first few months of my life. My parents have never been the biggest fans of online media, despite my father being a software engineer, but even they knew that at some point they had to get used to the digital age and learn to raise their family in it.
 
I watched a lot of cable television as a child. There is video evidence of a toddler me getting excited when the Sesame Street theme song started playing, and another of a slightly older me strumming along to the Dora theme song with a very out-of-tune plastic guitar in my parents’ bedroom. My mother said that my father and I used to drive her insane, arguing over whether I got to watch Nick. Jr or if he got to watch CNN, while she had to wait until midnight to try and watch HGTV.
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Cocomelon was created in 2005 by Jay Jeon, a TV commercial director, and his wife, a children’s book author. They started making videos in order to accompany the nursery rhymes that they were teaching their young sons. Their YouTube channel was initially under the brand name ABC Kid TV, but in 2018, they rebranded to Cocomelon as the show steadily garnered more viewership. I was a pre-teen when Cocomelon became a household name in mid-2020, so in trying to distance myself as much as possible from childhood, I didn’t interact with it much more than rolling my eyes whenever someone mentioned the overhyped YouTube-based kids show. However, I learned very quickly how my mother, a pediatric nurse practitioner, felt about the channel. She’d come home after work, lamenting how she couldn’t get a child’s vitals because they refused to look up from their iPad, how parents saw declines in their children' s development as they spent less time with their toys, and more time glued to a screen. These, unfortunately, weren’t isolated incidents. And they certainly didn’t go away after life resumed as normal.

Cocomelon’s quick rise to fame is attributed to two factors: the first is the ability to reach a large audience without the interference of a network (shows like Sesame Street and SpongeBob SquarePants had to fight for years before getting on the air. However, with the freedom of YouTube, Cocomelon was not only able to reach a large audience of people, but do so without having their show altered mercilessly at the hands of uber-rich TV executives) and the second is a consumer base on lockdown that was desperate for kids' content to keep their increasingly annoying toddlers busy while they tried to figure out what the new normal was under a pandemic.

Cocomelon’s strongest and most dangerous ability lies in its unrelenting grasp on kids’ attention spans for long periods of time. Cocomelon episodes are mostly, if not entirely, done in song. The songs mainly consist of already established kids’ nursery rhymes, or newly created ones that fit the same easy-to-follow lyrics and melodies of their predecessors. Additionally, the show is full of bright, enticing colors. The animation is 3D and notably has very few sharp edges or corners. There is little to no conflict for the characters through the episodes, and the people depicted remain cheery and smiling throughout. All of these attributes make Cocomelon not only enticing to kids, but engaging for them, making for easily digestible episodes that children can spend hours on end watching.

The issue with the show, however, is what happens after the children are pulled away from the screen.

While there’s no crime in nursery rhymes, there’s little intellectual benefit in a toddler staring at "ants go marching one-by-one (hurrah, hurrah)" if no one is there to reinforce that the important part of the insect parade is the numbers, not the bugs. A child blankly watching an animated toddler struggle to use the big kid potty doesn’t matter in the long run if parents aren’t following through on the potty-training. The addictiveness of Cocomelon keeps children loving the show, yes, but it also prevents them from making valuable strides in the building of their young minds. The issue isn’t that kids love Cocomelon, because of course they do. The issue is that Cocomelon doesn’t love its kids enough to make videos that will genuinely benefit their young minds. Because Cocomelon doesn’t make videos for children anymore; they make videos for their shareholders.

The commodification of children’s media — especially media geared towards children between the ages of 4 and 10 (prime “sticky iPad” years) — has become increasingly popular as children spend more of their time online. The addictive nature of Cocomelon makes  weaning children off a difficult task.

And, of course, Cocomelon knows this. A loyal customer is an endless money fountain. And what is more loyal than a screen-addicted toddler who will remain addicted to your program for, at the very least, two years? Because, really, what does the cognitive development of our nation’s future decision-makers matter when there’s an estimated $128 million to be made each year?

The red target on the back of children’s media has been growing ever since people realized that tapping into that market has the possibility of being immensely profitable, should one push the right buttons and learn to play into the desires of a child’s mind. While the bright colors, fast cuts, and lively music keep a child’s attention, they ultimately harm their development, teaching their young brains to only accept instant gratification as an acceptable outcome. A 2011 study on the impact of fast-paced television on preschool-aged children’s executive function found that just 9 minutes of viewing a fast-paced television show had immediate negative effects on the executive function of 4-year-olds. Now imagine the effects over 9 hours? How about 9 days?

The truth is that the predatory behavior of screen-feeding anti-intellectual fluff into kids’ minds isn’t going to stop -- it’s just too profitable. Of the top 10 YouTube channels right now, six of them make content geared towards a young audience. The window for us as a society to undo the harm caused by years of ingesting mindless, often exploitative content is closing, and as a matter of fact, it may already be closed. Because whether we like it or not, the Cocomelon toddlers of 2020 are the “Skibidi Toilet”, “6-7”, “Tung Tung Tung Sahur” brainrot kids of 2026. The question of whether kids' content farms, such as Cocomelon, are damaging to the minds of children isn’t a question anymore. There is proof of the harm it causes. Go to any elementary school teacher and they’ll confirm this. Our children are struggling.

Only 30 percent of 4th graders are proficient in reading as of 2024. At the same time, just over half of kids ages 0–8 have their own tablet or cell phone. The prevalence of childhood anxiety and/or depression in US children has risen from 9 percent to 13 percent. This trend is worrying, but few kids' channels are making an effort to curb this, despite being some of the biggest players due to the digital era we live in. From 2020 to the present, Cocomelon’s content has hardly changed. What has changed are their numbers, which have significantly increased. Cocomelon has made yacht-fulls of money off of introducing children to mindless content. Baby’s first doomscroll.
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I look back fondly at days and nights spent cuddled up with my family on an aging sofa, watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. My brother and I used to beg my mom to stay up a little past our bedtime in order to finish episodes of Wild Kratts. The first time that I truly liked math was when I was watching Peg + Cat. And my whole family got a little teary-eyed during a special two-part episode of Jake and the Neverland Pirates where Captain Hook took away the beloved sentient ship, Bucky. All that is to say that despite having very strict screen time limits as a child, kids’ shows helped shape who I am as a person. Watching Super Why! ignited my love for writing, Dinosaur Train taught me that it was okay to be different. Wild Kratts gave me an admiration for nature, and Jake and the Neverland Pirates showed me how to be adventurous. There were other shows that I watched as a kid, but these were reserved for vacations, because my parents understood the value of good kids' media. Shows like The Amazing World of Gumball, Victorious, Jessie, Teen Titans Go!— while entertaining, I can admit, were lacking in genuine substance when all was said and done. There is little I remember about the plots of those shows compared to the ones that my parents encouraged my brother and I to watch.

While sitting your toddler down for a few Cocomelon songs isn’t the most evil thing that you can do to them, I do believe that something is worrying about a society that is increasingly more comfortable with valuing profits over the intellectual growth of its future inhabitants. The more that we treat our children’s developing minds as products to be bought and sold, the further we slip into a reality where brainrotted zombies roam our streets. 
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I give Cocomelon 1 star.