Sesame Street's Impact on Society

By Hailey Cheng

You only have to look at the colourful muppets for a matter of seconds to feel instantly nostalgic. Watching some of your favourite characters– Elmo, Cookie Monster, Grover, Bert and Ernie, Big Bird– come to life, spending their days playing and learning, is truly a delightful trip down memory lane.

The show began on National Educational Television (NET), and began the journey into educational programming, focusing on enriching minds. It then seamlessly integrated into the PBS, expanding its mission. Its artistic importance to children’s television cannot be overstated. By becoming almost a necessity to educational television, Sesame Street changed its country— and eventually, the world.

According to a meta-analysis conducted by researchers at UV Madison, watching international co-productions of Sesame street has a benefit of aiding children’s learning, and serves an “enduring example of a scalable and effective early childhood educational intervention.”

Commissioned by Sesame Street Workshop, the non-profit educational organisation that transformed children’s television with the iconic “Sesame Street”. UW Madison researchers Maire- Lousie Mares and Zhong Dang Pan presented their findings in the 2013 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Seattle.

The pair analyzed the results of 24 studies, conducted with more than 10,000 children in 15 countries.

Shaped by research, Sesame Street aims to create edutainment programmes featuring a range of characters and sets specifically designed for young children. That summative, the research forms the core of the current study, along with the help of a few other databases to support everything. The authors examined and spotted outcomes that were divided into 3 categories, which include: cognitive outcomes, such as numeracy and literacy; learning about the world, like health and safety knowledge and social attitudes towards out-groups.

Beyond immediate learning gains, research shows that Sesame Street contributes to lasting improvements when it comes to enhancing children’s performance at school and interpersonal skills. Levine and his fellow researcher Dr. Melissa Kearney found that children with access to Sesame Street Broadcasts progressed further in grade level during elementary school, and had better educational outcomes compared to other children without access, with the help of the show’s characters teaching them about the alphabet, numeracy, and basic concepts, like kindness and teamwork.

“Children who were preschool age in 1969 and who lived in areas with greater Sesame Street coverage were significantly more likely to be at the grade level appropriate for their age through school. The effect on grade-for-age status is particularly pronounced among boys, and black, non-Hispanic children,” the authors wrote in their study.

Building on its success in promoting academic skills and social development, Sesame Street has also leveraged its fuzzy characters to encourage a healthier lifestyle amongst its young audiences.

In 2013, Sesame Street’s impact on children became wider and varied— They partnered in the produce industry, aiming to help market fresh fare to kids using stand-alone signs, stickers and labels. Plenty of American research has also shown that it works: “hand kids an apple emblazoned with an Elmo sticker and he’ll choose it over cookies and French fries”, one study suggested.

A South American pilot of three years has some of the Muppets learning eating and exercise habits and observing if it will catch on with children. Bert and Ernie are jumping rope and snacking on carrots at the Latin branch of Sesame Workshop, while Cookie Monster reminds himself that cookies are once-a-week treats, not an everyday habit. These initiatives underscore Sesame Street’s evolving mission to support children’s well-being in diverse and meaningful ways.

All in all, Sesame Street’s impact goes far beyond entertainment. Through its innovative blend of education, health promotion and social development, it has become a powerful force to create a positive change in a child’s mind. By continuously adapting to the needs of diverse audiences, Sesame Street remains a great example of how media can foster healthy habits and enhance a child’s everyday performance. Its legacy is not only in the lessons taught but in the lasting inspiration it provides to generations of children and families around the globe.