In 1999, Fred Rogers, of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, showed his young viewers a boxy beige machine that was still a novelty in about half of American homes: a computer. He held up a corded mouse (“Have you ever seen a computer mouse? It’s something that helps people work their computers”), placed it on a mouse pad, and used it to navigate his new website—Mister Rogers’ first online neighborhood.
Sara DeWitt, ’96, MA ’97, has that mouse pad—signed by Rogers—framed in her office. She joined PBS in 1999 and was a member of the team that built the Mister Rogers website. Watching the episode was an “awesome moment,” she says. “Just to be able to see what we had built on the TV screen.”
Today, DeWitt is the general manager and senior vice president of PBS Kids. Her expertise is in digital media for children, a field whose promise she first saw at Stanford in the fall of 1996, in a class that paired English majors like her with computer science students to experiment with interactive media and storytelling. “I came out of that getting really excited about the interactive possibilities of narrative for kids,” she says. She’s helped build educational experiences for kids on a variety of platforms, leading teams that produce award-winning games and apps, augmented reality experiences, and podcasts for PBS Kids.
Much has changed during DeWitt’s 26-year career at PBS. The vast majority of U.S. households have access to the internet and, on average, 17 connected devices. The chunky box that Mister Rogers showed children has become a relic, and YouTube has replaced traditional TV as the top platform for kids. Most of the material there isn’t intended for them, but with a total of 500 hours of video uploaded every minute, it’s content chaos. “Parents have a hard time figuring out what is and isn’t good for their kids,” DeWitt says.
But this is where PBS shines, she says. It has been perfecting children’s television for 55 years, and in the new media landscape, there is still plenty to learn from one of the oldest powerhouses in educational programming. DeWitt and her collaborators weigh in with three important lessons on what can still make kids’ content great.
Base it on research
In the summer of 1968, more than 100 leading specialists in early education and child development, as well as researchers, writers, and artists, convened to devise a new kind of TV show. They called it Sesame Street. It was based on the results of a three-month study conducted by documentary producer and Sesame Street co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney, who had traveled the country interviewing early learning professionals, children’s television producers, and filmmakers. The result was a show that not only entertained kids but, studies showed, also helped prepare them academically and emotionally for their later childhood years.
This is the legacy DeWitt works to maintain. Just as PBS partnered with Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street, DeWitt and the PBS Kids team commission, distribute, and help develop other great kids’ shows, seeking guidance from educators and university researchers in fields such as math, literacy, and child development. Their content is funded by “viewers like you,” as well as by grants from institutions such as the Department of Education.
PBS Kids also brings in experts in chidren’s emotional health and well-being. Paula Rauch, a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has done such work for more than 20 years, reading through scripts for shows such as Arthur, Curious George, and Work It Out Wombats! She’s helped writers navigate how to create characters who grieve, have nightmares, wet the bed, and experience depression. A character on Arthur—Dr. Paula—was based on her. “There was nothing that I did in all of my child psychiatry work that was more interesting to [my] Harvard medical students than the fact that I was Arthur’s child psychiatrist,” she says, laughing.
DeWitt and her team commission before-and-after studies of many PBS Kids shows and games to ensure that their content meets its educational and social-emotional development goals. When first graders from low-income families had two weeks to watch videos and play games based on Molly of Denali—a Peabody Award–winning show about the daily adventures of an Alaska Native girl—researchers found that the children were better able to use informational text (for example, from a book or website) to solve problems—like finding the answer to a question or using an index to locate a topic in a book.
“It’s pretty exciting,” DeWitt says. “Just playing [a] game could make a difference.”
Captivate kids
PBS Kids focuses on content for children ages 2 to 8, a demographic not exactly known for its patience. Capturing attention has always been a crucial ingredient in its recipe. “If you don’t reach, you don’t teach,” says Stephen Youngwood, MBA ’97, a former CEO of Sesame Workshop.
But how they engage kids has varied. For Sesame Street, according to a report written by Cooney, the team took notes from 1960s TV commercials, which easily captured children’s attention and had them effortlessly remembering product names and ingredients in grocery stores. They leaned into slapstick comedy after observing children respond more to that than to other forms of humor, such as satire. They flashed distracting slides while children watched the show, tracking their eye movements to determine how well their segments held a child’s interest.
Conversely, the pace of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was unconventionally slow to allow children time to process, make connections, and concentrate. Fred Rogers held long, direct stares at the camera to create intimacy with child viewers while posing intriguing questions about things that they silently wondered and worried about, including eye doctor appointments and how crayons are made, as well as divorce and the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
DeWitt and her team are always on the lookout for new voices that can thread the needle of education and entertainment. Even with viewership fragmented among platforms, they’ve found storytelling that resonates. Wild Kratts, created by and starring real-life zoologist brothers Chris and Martin Kratt, premiered in 2011 and parlays a common childhood interest in animals into educational global explorations of wildlife and animal habitats. The series, a mix of live action and animation, averaged 40 million streams a month on PBS Kids last year.
“The founders of Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Reading Rainbow, and other landmark programs, they’ve all said they could not have done this work on a commercial network,” says Milton Chen, MA ’83, PhD ’86, who built science curricula for Sesame Street episodes in the ’70s and later became executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. “Because of where its funding comes from, that it’s noncommercial, it has more freedom to really design programs for kids’ interests.”
Stay accessible
From 2016 to 2023, Nielsen ratings (which measure viewership of shows) for Disney Channel fell 90 percent, and ratings for Nickelodeon fell 86 percent—a trend away from broadcast and cable television. Meanwhile, a 2020 Pew Research report found that 80 percent of parents of children ages 0 to 11 said their child watches YouTube (that includes 57 percent of parents of 0- to 2-year-olds), with more than a third of kids under 11 watching YouTube “several times a day.”
PBS “has to meet the kids on the platforms,” says Youngwood. In 2019, PBS Kids made full episodes of its shows available on YouTube, and it now livestreams shows (click play and find yourself in the middle of Carl the Collector, Lyla in the Loop, or Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, a spinoff of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood) 24 hours a day.
Though PBS Kids strives to serve all children, it focuses on those who need the most support. “We are trying to make sure that kids who can’t pay for content are getting great, high-quality content,” says DeWitt. Its games and shows can be downloaded wherever Wi-Fi is available, then played later at home or in a car, even if there’s no internet access there. The games are designed to work not only on the newest devices but also on those that are three or four generations old.
For DeWitt, children’s media still holds all the potential it did when she was a kid. PBS may have become a smaller portion of kids’ media diet, but it’s one of the most nutritious. On platforms such as YouTube, its videos are a click away from plotless cartoon clips and toy unboxing videos that are churned out daily. But that perhaps makes an even stronger argument for the thoughtful, well-crafted shows DeWitt has dedicated her career to. “In my mind,” she says, “this makes PBS more important than ever.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
From top: Sesame Street Workshop; ©2020 WGBH Educational Foundation. All Rights Reserved. "Arthur" & the other Marc Brown ARTHUR characters and underlying materials (including artwork) ™/© Marc Brown; ©2018 WGBH Educational Foundation; Fuzzytown Productions, LLC; Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood ©2012 The Fred Rogers Company; Lyla in The Loop™/©2023 Mighty Picnic LLC, All Rights Reserved
