Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. My son Levi, much to my frustration, has never been a big TV kid. For years, I’d put on an episode of Paw Patrol or a newish Disney movie, but nothing seemed to stick. Either he’d come to me halfway through to report he was bored or he’d be entertained enough to finish but would never request a second viewing or talk about it afterward. I attributed this to a personality quirk or insufficient attention span, until the day, when he was 7, that I showed him Gene Wilder’s 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Now this “family movie” he loved. Same thing with The Wizard of Oz (1939). And then with an old children’s TV show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse (1986–90). They say three is a trend, the rate of occurrence upon which one moves past the threshold of randomness and into the realm of fixed preference that we often identify as “taste.” Levi seemed to like older movies and TV. Levi seemed to dislike newer movies and TV. I sat down to watch an episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse with him, and a hypothesis about why this is the case took shape. All the movies and TV shows Levi is drawn to have a psychological ambiguity mixed with a psychedelic silliness that seemed hard to find in much of today’s popular kids’ content. Comfort alloyed with discomfort. Connection alloyed with loneliness. Heavy alloyed with light. Or, more succinctly, they were an accurate reflection of a day in the life of an average kid’s mind. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement This made for a sharp contrast with much of the popular kids’ content I had earlier suggested and he had refused, entertainment that prioritized delivering easy moral lessons over observations on the eternal messiness of being human. And fair enough. It’s hard to teach right and wrong while also conceding how genuinely strange life is as a thinking, feeling human in relationship with other such humans. While this is the case for all of us, the veil between the conscious thought and subconscious urges is much thinner for children. Advertisement I was glad Levi had discovered an escape hatch from the clutches of didacticism that permeate the screen and the page these days. But I also wondered why it was content from the past that had helped him find his way out—and what kind of impact the apparent decline of playful, psychologically ambiguous works might have on his and other kids’ psychology. The de-weird-ification of children’s media is part of a broader, complicated story. Back in the 1980s—the era of children’s media that I, a person born in 1979, am most nostalgic about—children’s television filled Saturday- and Sunday-morning time slots that otherwise held little value for networks. As such, creators had a fair amount of freedom to experiment without much meddling from higher-ups, Kyra Hunting, an associate professor of journalism and media at the University of Kentucky, explained to me. Advertisement Advertisement This started to change for two reasons. First, Hunting notes, those higher-ups realized that they could license children’s TV characters and sell toys. Suddenly, more money was at stake, and with money comes risk aversion. Second, in the late 1990s, federal laws changed in a way that allowed for consolidation of ownership of media companies, leading to less variety and more pressure to perform for the sake of the bottom line. Advertisement Another shift that happened since the 1980s, Hunting says, is that children’s media became more age-specific. The rise of cable television in the late 1980s and early ’90s made room for more content, which made room for age segregation. Television for preschoolers became a thing, and TV shows lost some of the abstraction that makes programming appealing to a wider range of ages. Fast-forward to the past decade, when global streaming services appeared, alongside the rise of YouTube and smartphones. We are all consuming content in this “second screen” era, during which producers of shows are told to keep things basic because people are probably reading their phones while watching TV. Meanwhile, the algorithms of streamers promote the most generically appealing, lowest-common-denominator content. Kids’ enthusiasm for this meh content, such as it is, is heavily reinforced by the toy aisles at Target, where merchandise for these widely consumed shows is abundant. One can purchase a Paw Patrol activity rug, a DC Comics deluxe figure set, a SpongeBob SquarePants interactive plush house, and countless other plastic and polyester iterations of the most popular entertainment franchises. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement This doesn’t mean there weren’t uninspiring kids’ TV and movies in the past, with their attendant merch, nor does it mean there isn’t inspiring stuff in the present. Hunting points out that the better and weirder stuff from the past has endured, while the rest has been largely forgotten. There is plenty of international content that is brimming with psychological complexity, including, notably, Hayao Miyazaki’s oeuvre. (Levi watched these way too young, when his older brother became obsessed with them—it’s probably time for him to return now that they are more age-appropriate.) There are also newer shows—Hunting recommends Infinity Train, The Amazing World of Gumball, and Owl House—that aren’t widely known. Advertisement “I got into kids’ media because it’s weird. Today the weird stuff tends to get buried,” Hunting said. “There’s so much more kids’ media available than there was in the past, so even when, like, weird, quirky things exist, it’s so much harder to find them.” Advertisement I suspect that there is another factor at play here. This is the rise of what we often call “intensive” parenting but I think might, particularly in this circumstance, be better described as “productivity-oriented parenting.” Many parents these days feel guilty about screen time and are more comfortable with content that is serving an explicitly educational purpose. This point was reinforced by the vast majority of children’s TV experts whose CVs I reviewed when researching this article; these experts study the practical academic, social, and ethical lessons children are learning from TV and movies, as well as how effectively they are learning them. Few seemed invested in the aesthetic, visceral, or ambiguously emotional. “Kids benefit tremendously from putting together strange connections and the whole complex messiness of the world,” Hunting said, “but parents don’t always think that they do, and parents are the real person that, especially when it comes to younger kids, [producers] are selling to.” Advertisement Now, to be clear, I’m by no means against children learning valuable lessons about cooperation, sharing, and empathy from television. Nor am I against them learning about inclusivity, gender and racial discrimination, and the importance of advocating for those with less power or privilege. What bothers me is that this kind of instrumental content is so ubiquitous—and often insipid. Kids are inundated with visions of moral clarity, while recognition of life’s psychological messiness is in short supply. Meanwhile, a healthy childhood is a deeply untidy internal experience. As pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (of “good enough mother” fame), among many others, explained, children experience a fair amount of emotional ambivalence and are driven largely by intuition rather than logic. This makes instructive television and movies important but also deeply insufficient in helping them understand themselves and the world. TV and films that recognize these more chaotic, unknowable parts of the mind don’t just provide more exciting content. They can also make this chaos seem normal and healthy to children. There is real value in telling kids that life doesn’t always make sense, that ambiguity is normal, and that sometimes something can feel like two things at once, and that’s fine. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Many experts believe that one of the causes of the mental health crisis among children stems from their lack of comfort with having dark or complicated feelings. When they do experience this, they often jump to believing that something is wrong with them and may go on to identify with a clinical diagnosis, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of believing themselves to be sad or scared because life is a hot mess and hard and dark feelings are to be expected, they see themselves as having depression or anxiety and begin to filter all of their experiences through that lens. You might, like many of my friends whom I discussed this article with, be thinking: Well, what about the Inside Out movies? Yes, those films dealt with emotions, but the emotions were neatly labeled, defined, and ranked. In fact, the plot is specifically about navigating the weird and making sense of the weird, rather than serving as a compelling container for it. The Inside Out films do good things, but watching them is not the same as being a child and gazing at Gene Wilder’s serpentine eyes and thinking: Who is that? Who am I? No moralizing, no contextualizing—just pure, strange ambivalent feeling. And I’m sure you can fill in the blanks on my thoughts about Timothée Chalamet’s frictionless puppy-dog take on Wonka. Advertisement “Children’s lives are really messy. It’s like: I love you, I hate you, I hit you, I want to play with you. Children are grappling with all of it all the time, and it’s good for them to know that’s OK and there is nothing wrong with them,” Tovah Klein, author of Raising Resilience and professor of psychology at Barnard College, told me. Sometimes we adults should, she added, “allow children to make of these feelings what they want to,” without forcing a lesson into it. Advertisement You know who also stands to benefit from gazing into Wilder’s serpentine eyes and consuming all the other examples of psychologically ambivalent content for kids? Us grown-ups. Among the many burdens parents experience today is the feeling that we have to make complete sense of the world for our kids, plus their inner lives. My Instagram feed is filled with influencers encouraging me to explain everything to my children, addressing even their external and internal realities. “Levi, are you feeling jealous that Augie has a playdate and you don’t?” Advertisement At school, my kids encounter rigorous social and emotional learning curricula, which have included being asked to point to their emotional state on a chart that presents feelings like flavors of ice cream: Happy? Proud? Calm? Angry? Sad? I’m at least half of the feelings on the chart right now. Advertisement Advertisement Of course there is value to talking about feelings, and before you start worrying (Feeling No. 14 on the chart!), do know that I talk about feelings all the time with my kids—mine, theirs, and others’. But there is a difference between exploring feelings with our kids and feeling pressured by the broader culture to rationalize, contextualize, and hierarchize each and every one for them. Klein calls the parental impulse to turn every moment into a lesson “a misinterpretation of the parent-child relationship.” Watching Pee-wee Herman with Levi helped me understand this. Take, for example, an episode in which ants escape from an ant farm, creating a moment of menace and fear for Pee-wee and his friends, then travel through a mouse hole in the floorboard, where they encounter a Claymation dinosaur family whose father angrily chases them out with a plunger, after which the ants reenter the living room where Pee-wee is and invade his robot’s circuit board, producing a song that has Pee-wee call for everyone to do the “ants-in-your-pants” dance. It all gets resolved when an ant-covered, itchy Pee-wee summons a genie to put the ants back in the farm. In that one short plotline, there was chaos, terror, vulnerability, parental protectiveness, silliness, and magic (and, rather appropriately, a tiny Natasha Lyonne, who played one of Pee-wee’s visitors that day). It was beautifully lesson-proof content, emotionally salient while also, like our minds, a bit ridiculous. As such, it relieved me of my explainer role, permitting me to just lie on the couch and take it all in alongside my son, my shared appreciation serving as an unspoken confession that I, too, relate.