For those whose cultural experiences are largely absorbed through the prism of their mewling infants’ demands for the same thing 437 times in a row, it’s been a long four months. In late October last year, Rachel Accurso released Brush Your Teeth Song with Ms Rachel and Elmo. The 48m views it has since racked up reflect its status as a solid addition to the Ms Rachel canon, and the whole thing is obviously enhanced by Elmo’s guest spot. But it was studded with reheated clips from previous compilations, such as The Wheels on the Bus from Blippi & Ms Rachel Learn Vehicles, and It’s Potty Time from Potty Training With Ms Rachel. There is a limit to the number of plays an adult can reasonably be expected to endure of a bear puppet in a nappy hymning his ability to relieve himself, and the Ms Rachel hive is thirsting for something new.
Enter, on Friday, Learn With Ms Rachel – Friendship & Social Skills, an hour-long compendium, in which the leviathan of contemporary children’s edutainment helps her guests “model important social skills such as kindness, taking turns, sharing, asking a friend to play and helping others”. A few minutes on any of the subreddits that pore over Ms Rachel content clarifies the weight of this cultural moment. Or you could ask my two-year-old about it.
More than a sop to the ravenous hordes of toddlers who devour this stuff, though, the new video is Accurso’s first full-length attempt to meld her front-footed assertion of the rights of Palestinian children to play, and even to live, with the singsong cheeriness of Ms Rachel’s oeuvre. Keep politics out of the pabulum that distracts my kid while I’m making their dinner, some critics have demanded. Ms Rachel has thought about it, and decided she would rather not.
And so, after a brief prologue in which we are asked to share pretend ice-cream, a doorbell rings: “Rahaf’s here!” We cut to Ms Rachel sitting on the floor with a button-nosed three-year-old on her lap. As well as being preposterously cute, Rahaf is a double amputee: unmentioned in the video is that she lost her legs when an Israeli airstrike hit her home in Gaza. Her mother brought her to the US for surgery, but her father and two brothers were not permitted to go with them. Pictures of Rahaf in hospital in previous reports can only gesture at the catastrophe that she and her family endured; but here she is, pretending to nap alongside the titular rabbits of Hop Little Bunnies, bouncing sunnily from side to side when they wake up, then hurling herself back into Ms Rachel’s arms.
Preposterously cute … Learn With Ms Rachel. Photograph: Youtube
Accurso has always sought to emphasise that she wants every child to have the same freedom that she claims for Rahaf, and the rest of the episode serves as proof of the principle. We learn how to say hello in Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Tagalog and American sign language; an anxious puppet called Frankie is assured that his purple skin does not make him an outsider; there are children with physical and intellectual disabilities, a wheelchair swing, and a video call with Zach, who uses a communication device to say: “Hi, Ms Rachel. I love you.” None of these children are gawked at; they’re taking their rightful place in the kindergarten, and that’s the end of it.
The overall effect is an expansive vision of who gets to play, or be seen as deserving of care. There’s something hilarious, and moving, in the unapologetic relish with which Accurso rejects the idea that any of this is outside her lane, with every new scene taking another spin of the woke tombola. Oh, you thought the kaleidoscopic language lessons were a lot? Wait till you hear this Palestinian guy play the qanun!
Ms Rachel is far from the first entertainer and educator to present her audience with something other than the stilted monochrome of Watch With Mother. In an extraordinary 1981 episode of the US programme Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Fred Rogers met Jeff Erlanger, a 10-year-old wheelchair user who described his recent surgery, explained how stories cheered him up when he felt low, and sang his host’s best-known song, It’s You I Like. In the BBC’s magnificent Something Special, Mr Tumble (Justin Fletcher) places disabled and neurodiverse children front and centre. And Sesame Street’s revolutionary appeal was to make “the four-year-old inner-city black youngster” its target audience before any other.
Still, Accurso is doing something radical in the current climate. Kids like Rahaf and Jeff remain mostly notable by their absence from the mainstream. And a good portion of the YouTube slop served up to children is made by people who appear to see the form chiefly as a commercial opportunity; the creator of the cursed Blippi, after all, was previously known as Steezy Grossman, a grossout comedian who went viral when he defecated on a naked collaborator.
Accurso, in contrast, worked in a summer camp for disabled children, taught refugee children in Maine and spent years as a preschool music teacher. Anyone seeking to dismiss her as a tiresome symbol of the woke mind virus must also accept that the kids who love her are infected, too. Friendship & Social Skills suggests that if a toddler can understand that killing children is wrong, that is not a sign of the assertion’s naivety – but evidence of its elemental truth.
A lowball estimate of Ms Rachel’s total view count is 13.5bn. Formidable though she is, that number is less a measure of algorithmic ruthlessness than of what the parents who entrust their children to her can assume, the same things she can give Rahaf, at least for the duration of the segment: delight. Warmth. And, above all, safety.
Learn With Ms Rachel is on YouTube now.
