While Roald Dahl’s publisher for the English-language market is editing new editions of his works to avoid possibly harmful content, including derogatory descriptions of bodies and gender, his French publisher has “no plans” to make any changes. Last year, a spokesperson from an Italian political party asked for an episode of “Peppa Pig” displaying a same-sex couple, which had been welcomed in the United Kingdom, not to air in his country. And in 2020, Google removed the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s children’s app from its store because the American company found it inappropriate for preschoolers. These cases display how determining what content is appropriate for children often varies from country to country.
Several factors shape what constitutes appropriate children’s culture. These depend on a given society’s views of childhood and the role of media in their lives, which fluctuate with changing political and cultural waves — and which can differ significantly from place to place. Looking back at the fundamental disagreements between American and German collaborators when “Sesame Street” was first adapted for West German television audiences in the early 1970s can help us understand many of today’s heated debates about children and media.
When it first aired in the United States in 1969, the American version of “Sesame Street” aimed to be an educational alternative to commercial television. It focused on preparing young audiences for school — particularly “underprivileged” children — by using traditional educational methods of rote learning and testing. It taught numbers and letters in an entertaining way with the help of Jim Henson’s Muppets. Because of its diverse cast, outreach work and urban setting, “Sesame Street” has been seen as liberal in the United States.
Culturally, “Sesame Street” portrayed an idealized version of the world, including adult-child relationships with well-behaved children ready to listen to sensible adults. The show was poised to help American children fit into society’s existing norms, especially those of the educational system, so they would fare better later in life.
The production company, the Children’s Television Workshop, understood the show’s core ideas of childhood and education as being “culture free” — not espousing any political and cultural values or pushing a particular worldview. Believing all children would benefit from its unbiased approach to education, it eyed opportunities for selling “Sesame Street” overseas. “We are like the British Empire. Someday the sun will never set on Sesame Street,” the company’s first president, Joan Ganz Cooney, said in 1971. Reaching a global audience was a chance to create a business model in which international sales of broadcast and merchandise could finance domestic production and research. The show was sold both in the original English-language version and as slightly localized versions where local producers could add content.
The pursuit of a global market began as soon as the show was set to air in the United States. West Germany was one of the most lucrative and influential markets at the time, making it a key target for Children’s Television Workshop as early as 1970. But selling “Sesame Street” to West Germany, it turned out, proved challenging because its society held very different ideas about education and child-adult relationships.
In 1960s Germany, the experiences of World War II had a major effect on educational culture. To avoid a repetition of the horrors of the war and the Holocaust, educators and politicians across the political spectrum promoted a new, less authoritarian type of education. Educators and public intellectuals argued that children should learn how to stand up for themselves and criticize parents and other adult authorities. Education had to be more explicitly liberal and egalitarian, teaching children to be critical toward oppressive structures in both private and public spaces.
To make children’s television empowering, the West German producers wanted their version of “Sesame Street” to teach children to venture out and explore the world on their own. They wanted to give children the ability to question what they didn’t understand and make up their minds about things — even if that meant children drawing different conclusions from adults.
To that end, the German “Sesamstrasse” mixed clips from American episodes with locally produced vignettes. Unlike the American version, it focused on social education. In its first two seasons, segments included storylines on sibling rivalry, children fighting, defiant children, children using slang, arguing, misbehaving and explicitly questioning adults’ less-than-ideal behavior and mind-set.
One vignette from 1973 portrays a girl being ignored by adults in a shop. After being overlooked or actively pushed aside by adult shoppers several times, the girl gets behind the counter and takes what she needed. When asked by a store employee what she is doing, the girl simply asks the price of the bread, pays and leaves with the comment, “It’s the kids’ turn, too!”
Many of the locally produced inserts took children’s perspectives seriously and encouraged them to take matters into their own hands. Such child-centered content was supposed to enable children to question adult behavior critically and create a freer, more egalitarian society for the immediate benefit of all children.
This vision clashed with the teaching styles of the American “Sesame Street” and led to tensions between its creators and German collaborators. In 1972, an official letter from the American creators to their German counterparts expressed worry over the German inserts’ “treatment of the topic of questioning authority” because they so “clearly encourage[d] the viewing children to question and to defy regulations and restrictions imposed by adults.”
Similarly, the Children’s Television Workshop’s chief educational adviser in the United States, Gerald Lesser, thought the German segments were “arousing in the child emotions which he cannot yet understand or with which he cannot cope.” Lesser saw that child-centered approach as “entirely antithetical” to the workshop’s mission. He, therefore, advised that topics such as “questioning authority or deal[ing] with anger, jealousy, frustration, etc.” be avoided in future German productions.
The fight over social learning and its place in German “Sesamstrasse” continued for the first two seasons. However, the technical independence of the German setup and the fact that Children’s Television Workshop desperately needed money from German broadcast and merchandise deals gave the producers of “Sesamstrasse” the freedom not to follow all of the directives from their American counterparts.
The tensions over the content of “Sesamstrasse” show how ideas of what constitutes appropriate media content for children vary depending on a society’s history and the roles it carves out for its youngest inhabitants. The example of “Sesame Street” in two very different spaces helps us understand that divide.
Americans focused on achieving equality of opportunity sought to improve children’s educational performance. In this way, “Sesame Street” encouraged children to adapt to the existing educational system, social norms and child-adult power hierarchies. Producers saw children as being on a journey to becoming adults, rather than as individual beings with worthy points of view and experiences, which yielded television content that treated young viewers simply as pupils. In Germany, the same show addressed children as citizens.
The international history of “Sesame Street” shows us that no content is ever “culturally neutral.” Material that purports to be best for children depends on the social and political ideals we hold dear at a given moment in a specific society. That means when we discuss what content is right for children, it is also a discussion about which norms and values we would like to pass on to new generations.