As research shows 'unkind' world for kids, 'Sesame Street' rolls out kindness carpet

Just in time on Sesame Street this season: kindness rules.

The show — its 47th season premieres Saturday on HBO — focuses this year on kindness in all its permutations. The move follows a spate of recent research, including a wide-ranging Sesame Workshop survey of parents and teachers last October that found more than two-thirds of parents often worry that the world is “an unkind place for my child.” Among teachers, the figure was 86%.

About half of teachers said being kind “is not a priority” to most people.

Buried deep in the findings was an indicator that suggested parents might unintentionally contribute to the kindness crisis. Researchers asked a series of either/or questions, including this one: “Which is more important, having manners or having empathy?”

Manners won in a landslide: 58% of parents said manners were more important, while 41% rated empathy higher (1% said they didn’t know).

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

The new season comes as part of a larger bid to bring kindness front and center — and to be intentional about it, said Rosemarie Truglio, a researcher who oversees content and curriculum for the show.

“Our world is a very complicated world, and we know that kindness is in all of us,” she said. “But for really young children, I think we have to model it.”

Key to the lessons will be putting characters in one another's shoes.

“That’s hard for kids,” Truglio said. “They don’t have the cognitive abilities to do that.”

Recent research has shown “self-regulation” and other “pro-social” behaviors, when displayed in children, are good predictors of health, financial stability and educational achievement later in life. But kids need not only adults to model the behaviors, Sesame researchers say — they need ample time to practice them.

Kindness is one of the three bedrock principles of Sesame Workshop, the New York-based educational nonprofit behind the show. Its mission statement is to help children grow “smarter, stronger and kinder.” But until now, the show has never called out kindness specifically.

“It’s part of our DNA,” Truglio said. “I just wanted to make it a little bit more explicit. I wanted to get beyond the niceness of manners — and I really wanted to empower children.”

So the new season will not only model kind behaviors — it’ll explicitly label kindness when it happens, employing a kind of instant replay and color commentary during moments when characters are kind to one another.

Episodes will also feature a “kindness cam” segment in which kids imitate behaviors from the show.

“It’s repeated in many of the episodes, time after time, which helps underline the message and the behavior,” said Brown Johnson, the show’s creative director and executive producer.

She said kindness can be taught at an early age, “but you really have to be specific about it and model it.”

The new season debuts as Americans' attitudes about self-improvement shift a bit. After a raucous presidential election season, the No. 1 New Year's resolution in 2017 isn't "losing weight" or "exercising more," a new Marist poll finds. It's "being a better person."

That vow knocked weight loss from the No. 1 spot for the first time since 2014, according to the findings. In 2016, "being a better person" came in sixth among people who make New Year's resolutions, between "improving one’s health" and "eating healthier."

Johnson pointed out that planning for the new season began more than 18 months ago, well before last fall’s fraught election kicked into high gear. So we can’t blame that spectacle. But even before the election, she said, world events were forcing us all to look at things differently.

She noted that many of the news stories of refugees from places like Syria over the past few years have focused on children and their perilous path to safety. “Not to be political, but we all could stand to see life from somebody else’s point of view,” Johnson said.

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo