Speak and Sell

By Sophie Pinkham

In our new issue, Sophie Pinkham considers what children’s YouTubers like Ms. Rachel can really offer to parents.  

IT WAS WINTER in upstate New York, and the house was drafty. There were three of us at home: me, my mother, and my two-year-old daughter. Before my child—let’s call her Stella—was born, I scoffed at screens, at parents who gave their children iPads in restaurants and smartphones in their strollers. I was soon chastened. It had been sleeting for days, and there’s only so much peekaboo one woman, or even two, can play every hour. I had sung “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” until I’d gone hoarse.

That fateful afternoon, I put on a show recommended by a friend with a child slightly older than Stella. I was still a novice in the field of children’s streaming content. Free on YouTube, the program was called Songs for Littles; many refer to it simply by its creator’s name, Ms. Rachel.

I lay on the couch, trying to gather the strength to do yet another load of laundry, and watched Stella watch the screen. This was relaxing: I was close to my beloved child, but for once, she was asking nothing of me. What was not relaxing was Ms. Rachel, whose affect struck me as enthusiastic bordering on deranged.

“Hi FRIENDS! I’m SO excited to LEARN with you toDAY!”

About forty years old, Ms. Rachel was dressed like a giant toddler, with a bubble-gum-pink headband, matching baby tee and Converse, and denim overalls. She smiled relentlessly as she sang nursery rhymes, counted, and pronounced simple words with an exaggerated intonation. She dipped out of sight, popped back, and said “peekaboo.” Unlike me, Ms. Rachel never got tired of playing. Ms. Rachel was never in a bad mood or distracted. Stella could watch her play peekaboo a million times if she wanted to. YouTube is the perfect parent: its energy never flags. How could I ever match Ms. Rachel’s enthusiasm? When she performed “Wheels on the Bus,” she was as jubilant as Julie Andrews in a field of wildflowers on an Austrian mountaintop.

“Hearing ‘good job’ lobbed into the void again and again drove me crazy: the final reduction to meaninglessness of American parental praise.”

Something about Ms. Rachel got under my skin. The sexualization of young children is a staple of media anxiety; Ms. Rachel, a middle-aged woman stripped of the markers of adulthood, represents the opposite swing of the pendulum. She is often compared to Mister Rogers, the secular saint of American children’s media, but Mister Rogers was a grown-up man in a tie, with a default tone of gentle seriousness. That was part of his authority. Ms. Rachel’s megatoddler costume seemed to me to embody the American assumption that the adult woman disappears with the birth of her child, when she is transformed into a caring appendage, desexed and infantilized, addressed as “Mom” even by strangers, and starts spending holidays with her children in matching pajamas.

On a more basic level, I found Ms. Rachel annoying. She is perhaps most famous for her singsong, high-pitched voice. When I googled her, I found that I was not alone in finding this voice deeply irritating, along with her slow, exaggerated delivery and relentless good cheer. But Stella loved Ms. Rachel. Stella was giggling with joy.

“Should we go DOOOOOOOWN the SLIIIIIIIDE?”

“THAT was FUUUUUUUN!”

“I WONder if we can COUNT even HIGHer than FIIIIIIIIIIVE!”

Ms. Rachel cast prompts into the digital nothingness and then paused as if waiting for a response: “Can you say ‘BALL’?” She cupped her hand over her ear with a dramatic gesture and then cried, “Good JOB! You DID it!” She is big on affirmation, the staple of the “gentle parenting” method that is the conventional wisdom for bourgeois millennials. But hearing “good job” lobbed into the void again and again drove me crazy: the final reduction to meaninglessness of American parental praise, lavished on a child simply for existing. Gentle parenting is, of course, preferable to abuse or rigid authoritarianism. But it raises the question of what will happen when the child enters the cruel, unfeeling real world and the praise tap is suddenly shut off. Are such children doomed to become adults who listen to self-help audiobooks and YouTube lectures of anonymous affirmation?

Stella never answered Ms. Rachel’s prompts that afternoon, perhaps because she knew Ms. Rachel couldn’t hear her. She just smiled adoringly and waited for Ms. Rachel to keep talking.

I turned off the TV and persuaded Stella to play with blocks. I was trying to be a good mother. “Good JOB! You DID it!” I cooed when she finished a tower. I said it without thinking. It was a reflex, not a choice.

Continue reading “Speak and Sell,” an essay by Sophie Pinkham, on our site.

Subscribe

You received this email because you signed up for The Baffler’s newsletter mailing list, have a Baffler subscription, donated to our foundation, or contributed to the magazine. Want to change how you receive these emails? Update your preferences, or unsubscribe from this list. For questions about your subscription, contact Customer Care.

To ensure our email updates reach your inbox, please add newsletter@thebaffler.com to your email Address Book.