”Sesame Street” is about more than teaching basic educational skills. It’s also about educating kids on the importance of diversity, playing nice with others, coping with problems, and how letters and numbers can afford sponsoring TV shows. But still there are some crucial lessons the show has failed to impart that every child must know.
Beware of Frenemies
“Sesame Street” has always stressed the value friendship. But it also needs to show that some people use friendship as a weapon to undermine a rival, even when it’s just to make another toddler hate how they look in Pampers Easy -Ups. This can be best explained by the dark, cautionary tale of how a scheming Elmo belittled and berated every single cast member on the show until he was both the focal point of all merchandising and the only Muppet not suffering from an eating disorder.
Most Childhood Dream Jobs Pay Poorly, Have Been Phased Out or Don’t Really Exist
The truth can be painful but children need to know that professional trampoline jumpers usually don’t make rent, most princesses were disposed of or beheaded long ago, and until proper funding can be secured for Jedi Academy, exciting opportunities for would-be padawans are minimal at best. And who better to tell how professional idealism leads to financial hardship than Oscar the Grouch, whose own imaginative career plans led to him living in a cylindrical studio apartment full of trash.
One Day You Will Have to Give Up Something You Truly Love
Maybe you’ll have to give up eating cookies for your health (or because you finally realize that your fabric mouth prevented you from ever swallowing them in the first place). Maybe you’ll have to give up traveling so you can afford your kid’s college tuition (only for that kid to move back home after graduation while you and your spouse hold down five jobs and a drug mule gig on the side). Maybe you’ll have to give up something so dear to your heart, so vital to your very happiness, just because circumstances demand it. But most likely it will be the cookies thing. Hence why the series should show more scenes of a now dessert-free Cookie Monster convulsively sobbing over a plate of steamed vegetables.
You Will Lose Touch with 95% of Your Current Friends
No doubt as kids hang out with their fellow Pre-K pals on the playground, network with them over milk and cookies or bond over how Legos will forever trump Mega Bloks they’re thinking. “This is it. These are my friends for life.” But they should know that life often gets in the way of such things. Families move, building brick priorities change, and frankly some kids just turn into raging a**holes in middle school. And so you drift further and further apart, only to hear from them 20 years from now on whatever will have replaced Facebook, making you fondly recall how they still owe you for that crayon they snapped in half in your Crayola sharpener.
Start Saving Money Right Now or You Are So Screwed
Today’s three-year-olds need to know that every birthday check, every dollar for candy, every coin they run out into heavy traffic to pick up off the street must be saved if they are to survive in a bleak economic future that looks like it will be “Road Warrior” minus that lunatic Mel Gibson. To stress this, “Sesame Street” should have Grover wisely save every single dime he makes from his 387 jobs on the show (from waiter to bus driver to doctor to ice cream man to construction worker to falafel vendor to cop on the take), always while uttering his new catchphrase, “Oh God! I need. More. MONEY!”
You Will Eventually Come to Despise Your Roommate Like No Other Person on Earth
Whether it’s the sibling your have to share a bedroom with at home, the fellow student you have to share a dorm room with in college or the stranger you have to split rent with for the rest of your adult life because you decided to professionally pursue miming, one day you will both be quietly sitting on the couch watching TV when suddenly you will glance over at him or her and think, “I could do it with the extension cord. I could choke that miserable S.O.B. to death right now and no would ever, ever know.”
What are some other hard lessons Sesame Street should teach? Let us know in the comments!
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