For over a decade, CoComelon has been babysitting hundreds of millions of children around the world.
The saccharine-sweet children’s show, with hypnotic nursery rhymes and clay-like rainbow colors, was created by Jay Jeon, a California father of two, to teach his two children the alphabet.
Today, CoComelon is a ratings phenomenon, with its most viewed videos on YouTube viewed by an average of one billion people, primarily preschoolers, each year.
But even though the show is quite mundane and based on songs and rhymes dating back decades or even centuries, many parents have said that their children have suffered addiction and withdrawal symptoms when they turn it off, calling it “Cocaine Melon.”
On Netflix, the series was watched for as many minutes (33.27 billion in fact) as Disney+’s Luca, Moana, Raya and the Last Dragon and Frozen II combined.
This success has also earned Mr. Jeon, who directed television commercials, and his children’s author wife $460 million. The idea arose in 2006 when its executives insisted that all episodes be planned with experts so that children feel safe, help in their education and encourage good behavior.
CoComelon’s Most Popular Bath Time Video Has Been Viewed Nearly 7 BILLION Times
3D animations often bring nursery rhymes and songs like ‘Wheels on the Bus’ to life.
Baa baa black sheep is expanded to three minutes to include animals of all colors
The owners of CoComelon, Moonbug, have been asked to comment.
A Cambridge academic has warned parents that programs like these can cause “technoference” – disruption of a child’s relationship with parents and siblings due to the use of electronic devices.
Some mothers and fathers have said that the show turned their children into ‘CoComelon zombies.’
One mother told MailOnline that her two-year-old son was allowed to watch the show. But the child, now three years old, would explode with rage when they turned it off, so they had to ban it.
She said: ‘CoComelon appears to be a colorful and stimulating program appropriate for children, but the detrimental impact on our son’s behavior led us to ban the program completely, even for short periods of time.
“He became obsessed and distracted while watching, which naturally appeals to parents busy with other children or chores to attend to. The problem arises when the program is stopped: the immediate aggression and lack of emotional management was terrifying. We had never seen it before. “I’ve never seen such a visceral reaction to any other children’s television program.”
Removing the cartoon sparked volcanic anger, he said.
“He would immediately throw himself on the ground, hitting the ground with his fists, apparently ‘coming back’ from the trance he was in,” the mother warned, adding that in the aftermath he was “generally in a bad mood and combative.” ‘.
Sally Hogg, senior policy researcher at the Center for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge, told MailOnline that while screen time is not necessarily bad, the missed opportunities for A child’s ability to play and learn in other ways can be a “missed opportunity” in his or her development.
He said even babies now “interact with digital media, including YouTube videos, as part of their daily lives.”
She said: ‘The impact of viewing online content on early childhood development depends on three things: the media content; the context in which they see it and what they don’t do as a result of seeing it. If very young children watch digital media, it is important that it does not take up so much of their time that it reduces their opportunities to play, interact with adults and other children, and be active.
Ideally, parents will watch the content with their children, helping them make sense of it and using it as a basis for conversation and shared time together.
Early parent-child interactions are vital for early development, and if a parent or child is distracted by digital media, this “technoference” can get in the way of positive interactions.
Parents should also be careful about giving children screens to calm them when they are upset or feeling other difficult emotions, because talking about emotions and learning to manage them is an important part of early development.”
When asked about the often angry and even violent response of some children when shows like CoComelon are turned off, he said: “Children often feel frustrated when adults prevent them from doing something they like or ask them to do something they they do not like it”. want. This is a normal part of child development.
‘If a child gets upset about stopping doing something, that doesn’t necessarily tell us about the value or harm of that object or medium.
“But if something regularly causes distress to a child or makes parent-child relationships difficult, that suggests parents need to consider how it is used, including thinking about how they manage their children’s expectations and understanding of boundaries.”
Jay Jeon and his unnamed wife had run a children’s YouTube channel for 13 years before changing its name in 2018. They sold it in 2020.
The American YouTube channel Cocomelon – Nursery Rhymes became the first to reach more than one billion weekly viewers.
Supporters of CoComelon founder Jay Jeon hail him as a “creative genius” who is “dedicated” to children’s education.
Born in South Korea, he moved to California and began working in advertising; He then directed a small number of low-budget television commercials.
When his two children were in daycare, he and his wife, an author, sang rhymes to them and decided to make basic 2D animations to accompany them, focusing on the alphabet.
Their children enjoyed them and began uploading the cartoons to YouTube in 2007, calling his channel ABC Kid TV.
17 years later, it has around 170 million subscribers.
Their number one video is the two-minute, fifty-two-second Bath Song, which is the fourth most viewed video on YouTube and viewed nearly seven billion times in six years.
A baby gets into the bathtub with his brother, pours soap on himself to create bubbles, and washes his hair and face, all to a hypnotic song.
His other hits with over a billion views include Baa Baa Black Sheep and a cover of Baby Shark.
Its creators say the biggest breakthrough came when they switched from 2D to 3D animation in 2017.
In 2020, their production company Treasure Studio sold the show to Moonbug, which expanded the show and has a great team working on it.
Views increased during the pandemic, where videos on how to wash your hands and see a doctor proved popular.
Its creators claim that CoComelon is good for children and also shows good behavior.
Each episode takes around three months to complete.
Experts and writers have questioned whether it is correct that the videos are aimed at such young children.
Susan Kim, who has written for Thomas & Friends and Arthur, told The New Yorker: “It used to be that there were certain things you couldn’t say, or you’d get reprimanded in the room.
‘On the one hand, you weren’t allowed to say that anything was for one- or two-year-olds. I think everyone had the feeling, whether or not they had read the technical documents on the matter, that such young children should not be stood in front of a video and left alone.
Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids, told Time: ‘It’s not that CoComelon is addictive.
‘It’s just that almost everything on the web is designed to be addictive.
‘You’re setting children up to start relying on screens to stimulate and calm them. What we really want is for children to have fun and relax.”