In late February 2020, flustered and rushing into the house to deal with a vomiting three-year-old, I fell in my driveway and twisted the absolute hell out of my ankle. After an urgent care trip, my toddler and I spent the following day stuck on the couch together, watching Peppa Pig.
I just don't know how much more of Peppa’s increasingly ridiculous antics I can take, I thought to myself while watching the episode where Mummy Pig has to parachute out of a plane to raise money for a new school roof, for some reason. Cut to just a few weeks later and the depths of lockdown, and I could have cried with gratitude for that animated pig’s existence.
Millennial parents often have a fraught relationship with screen time, especially when you consider that most of us watched plenty of television growing up. (It even had… commercials.)... But when I think about my kid’s cartoons, I feel something other than guilt or anxiety: I feel a surge of immense gratitude and downright fondness. I wouldn’t have made it through lockdown without first Peppa, then Paw Patrol, PJ Marks, Stinky and Dirty, Frozen and Frozen II.
Lockdown just was the beginning of my reevaluation of my child’s cartoons. I’ve come to love them on their own terms: Shout out to the Kratt Brothers and their deeply wholesome explanations of wild animal; my immense respect to the genius that decided to make a puppet show about a character named “Donkey Hodie” who lives in a windmill and his friend, “Purple Panda;” God bless the entire Encanto creative team. Please – never, ever stop. |
