In 1992, “Sesame Street” shot a story line about the divorce of Mr. Snuffleupagus’s parents, but after a test screening upset some preschoolers, producers pulled the episode. Its writer, Norman Stiles, later remarked that the team “felt safer” dealing with death than with divorce. It would take “Sesame Street” two more decades to address divorce in any substantive way, and even then it only did so on a 2012 DVD special.
“If screens are commonly enlisted to fulfill
a care function, becoming a substitute family member, they are also early transmitters in our kids’ lives of what a ‘family’ looks like,” Jean Garnett writes. As a divorced mother, she wanted to find quality programming that addressed the subject of parental separation, so she, with the help of her daughter, set out to find children’s shows that adequately portrayed a family unit like theirs. Read her essay: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essa...