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Strollerderby
Back when I was a kid, it seemed as if all my friends’ moms were addicted to soap operas. Today’s moms are more likely to have the TV tuned to kiddie shows — which is why it’s not such a surprise to hear that The Walt Disney Company will eliminate its SoapNet cable channel and replace it with a new network targeted to preschoolers.
Since it aired soap opera reruns, the 10-year-old SoapNet has been relatively cheap for Disney to operate. But, as Nickelodeon has discovered with Nick Jr. (formerly Noggin), preschool television programming is big business.
The new commercial-free channel will be called Disney Junior, which some critics say emulates Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr. Continue reading »
Parents spend a lot of time watching children’s television. Details writers spend a lot of time watching hot actresses. Who knew the two would one day come together?
Turns out Details think dads are doing a little bit of double duty these days. Continue reading »
It seems that the recent refund offer by Disney was the spark that reignited the flame of a decades-old controversy: Is television harmful to tots? Are we a society of lazy, selfish parents that use the screen as a live-in babysitter? And if so, are we creating a society of mush-brained mutants that call the remote “Daddy”?
Julia Pimsleur Levine, mother of 2 and creator of Little Pim, an educational foreign-language DVD series for the toddler set, has weighed in with the following letter:
If anyone can knock the Wiggles off your tot’s TV rotation, it’s the Imagination Movers – four dads from New Orleans who solve idea emergencies on the Disney Channel.
The show grabbed a Daytime Emmy out of the starting gate for outstanding original song in the children’s show/animation category – and now the Movers are going back on the road for a forty-city concert tour.
We grabbed Imagination Mover Scott Durbin, father of two and former award-winning teacher in the Movers’ hometown of New Orleans, to talk about rocking out, raising kids who’ve been through Katrina and why standards-based education doesn’t work for America’s kids: Continue reading »
Michelle Obama on Sesame Street
On November 10, 1969, a television show unlike any other debuted on PBS. Based on the idea that if you could hold the attention of children, you could educate them, the program introduced kids to a grouchy green creature who lived in a garbage can and an oversized yellow bird. That show, of course, was Sesame Street. Forty years later, the program that forever changed children’s television is celebrating with a brand new look and a VIP quest. Continue reading »
Levar Burton, host of the now canceled PBS children’s series “Reading Rainbow,” is glad to have closed that chapter of his life. What started as a steady paycheck following his acclaimed performance as Kunte Kinte in the TV series “Roots” turned into 26 years of lost opportunities and even greater acclaim.
And for what? The children? Not really. In “My Living Nightmare of Encouraging Kids to Read is Over,” Burton writes:
Fact is, I couldn’t care less whether kids learn to read. There, I said it.
And he says even more. Continue reading »
Since my family aren’t big TV watchers, I was a little slow to be introduced to Caillou, but I recently got a chance to plow through a pile of books based on the TV series (which is based, apparently on an older set of books).
For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, the series stars a four-year-old boy in “real life” situations like getting lost at the grocery store or having his first sleepover. They’re written with a lot of participation from a child psychologist, with the goals of showing a realistic kid experiencing realistic emotions and being treated with respect by the adults. Sounds thrilling, doesn’t it? Continue reading »
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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