Luckily Sesame Street’s Abby Cadabby and her friend Rocio Galarza, Senior Director of Outreach and Content Design for Sesame Workshop, are here to help. On Wednesday, February 20, Abby and Rocio will be taking questions about divorce and separation from parents, children, friends and anyone who has questions about staying resilient while navigating a divorce or separation.

Email us at divorce@sesame.org and Abby and Rocio will record an answer to your question in a video segment that will be posted online next week. In addition to your question, please include your name, age (if you wish) and your hometown so we can give say hello if your question is picked. We will also write you back directly if Abby and Rocio have the opportunity to answer your question.

Let your friends, family and colleagues know too! Everyone is welcome to send in a question. We can’t wait to hear from you.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

JoAnne Pedro-Carroll is a clinical and research psychologist and author of the award-winning book, “Putting Children First:  Proven Parenting Strategies for Helping Children Thrive Through Divorce.” 

Today, there’s an important conversation taking place at Sesame Street – another important conversation in a thoughtful and penetrating series that has taken place behind the scenes here over the past several years. Those conversations culminated in Little Children, Big Challenges: Divorce.

I can’t begin to tell you how important and valuable I believe this project is, and how particularly pleased I am that Sesame Street chose to tackle this very tough subject. Having spent more than 30 years working with children and families as they struggle with big changes in their lives, I have seen a very real need for what Sesame Street delivers. While the bookstores and media have a virtual torrent of information about divorce, much of it is conflicting. As a result, it can be very tough for parents to know what to believe, and how best to help their children through the transitions. That’s why Sesame Street, which has earned parents’ trust for basing its programming on a depth of quality research, and has a very wide reach, is such an invaluable resource on separation and divorce, as on so many other critical topics.

In the United States, some 40 percent of all children experience their parents’ divorce. We know from research that the series of changes this causes in children’s lives does impact them, sometimes in profound ways for their entire lives. We know that for some children the effects can be devastating. Despite the myth that all children – particularly young children – are resilient, they are not automatically so. But the good news is that it is possible for children to survive and thrive. Research has shown what factors and behaviors influence positive outcomes and promote children’s resilience. With this knowledge, parents, family, friends, health care providers, judges, mediators, attorneys, teachers, and everyone who cares about children have the opportunity to help children thrive.

This research is the body of knowledge that Sesame Street has tapped into and interpreted so thoughtfully and creatively – as always, with insight into and sensitivity towards young children’s developmental stages. In working with the talented and dedicated team that put together this project, I was deeply impressed by their commitment to providing children and parents with the verbal tools and positive messages to help them through what are often bewildering and frightening times.

In creating the divorce story around Abby Cadabby, the team chose a charmingly wispy – and potentially vulnerable – character that young children can relate to. By having her tell her story in retrospective, they give children a context for what they may be experiencing and an example of effective ways of coping.  Abby reveals that at first she had a number of different strong feelings – something typical of young children – but that her feelings changed over time. While she expresses some lingering sadness and disappointment over the fact that her family is no longer all together in one home – again, emotions that many children continue to feel – she focuses on the positives of the “two-hug days” when she experiences the unchanging love that both parents show her.

In conversations with Gordon and her Muppet friends, Abby also becomes the vehicle for other fundamental lessons. Many children believe that they caused their parents’ divorce, and many are convinced that they can get their parents back together again. Often they hide these and other fears, worries, and misconceptions from their parents. But through Sesame Street, children learn that divorce is a grownup problem that children do not cause and cannot solve.

Parents, too, learn from the Little Children, Big Challenges: Divorce resources what their children may be experiencing and how they can broach difficult conversations and offer reassurance. They witness, through Abby, the tremendous importance of children having age appropriate information about what will and will not change in their lives. Children lack the ability to label and understand their emotions at times.  The Sesame Street materials give parents child-friendly tools for connecting and communicating with children about their feelings.  The written materials and downloadable app all reflect the importance of parents’ taking good care of themselves and parenting in ways that convey their unending love, and creating calm transitions and consistent expectations and routines for children.

Research has shown that the three most detrimental factors for children experiencing their parents’ divorce are a breakdown in the parent/child relationship, unresolved, on-going conflict, and poor quality of parenting. Conversely – and this is where the Sesame Street model is so helpful – nurturing a loving and positive relationship with the child, behaving respectfully toward the child’s other parent, and providing positive parenting with both emotional warmth and authoritative limits pay enormous dividends in children’s short- and long-term well-being.

There’s so much more to say. But perhaps my biggest message today is that, once again, even as they struggle through their own transitions, parents can turn to Sesame Street with confidence that the insights and advice they offer for parents and children is absolutely spot-on.  This Sesame Street resilience project empowers parents with tools for providing a message of hope, healing, and healthy new beginnings.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Since its inception Sesame Street has been committed to tackling the challenges that young children face, no matter how difficult or unorthodox it may be to discuss those topics with children. With this commitment in mind, Sesame Workshop is taking on the subject of divorce, an emotional trial many children go through. Yet many parents are uncertain how to reassure or even explain what is going on to their children.

Storyboard, a storytelling project by Tumblr’s Department of Editorial, took a deeper look at the way Sesame Workshop is handling the subject of divorce. They wrote this piece about our divorce-focused outreach efforts and created the above video. We encourage you to check out both.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Matt Rogers with Rosita, Elmo, Gordon and the Marine Corps band.

Matt Rogers is the host of Lifetime’s Coming Home. On Memorial Day he performed Sesame Street’s new resiliency anthem with Elmo, Rosita, Gordon and the Marine Corps band. We recently sat down with Matt to talk about his Memorial Day performance, his admiration for our servicemen and women, and how he became the host of Coming Home.

Tell me a bit about the performance on the Intrepid on Memorial Day.

I had a blast. I felt like I was in my element. I’m a father of two and being in that role with two small kids is so much fun. When you’re doing something that you love to do, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like fun.  It felt great to be able to go out there and help these military families take their mind off what they’re going through.

You performed with Elmo, Rosita, Gordon and the Marine Corps Band. Was that fun?

Working with Roscoe Orman (who plays Gordon), Kevin Clash (who performs Elmo), Carmen Osbahr (who performs Rosita) and Wanda Witherspoon (Sesame Workshop’s Assistant Vice President of Events) was so much fun. And any time you work with the military you know they are going to be on point. They made it easy. It was very professional and everyone was prepared, which made it fun because it was smooth. Everyone was on the same page, working towards the same goal. You’re not just entertaining people, you’re helping these kids.

Your passion for our men and women in uniform is palpable. How did supporting our military become such an important cause for you?

I’ve always supported our military. I don’t come from a military family, but my great grandfather was in World War I. My grandfather was in World War II. My uncles were in Vietnam. My cousins were in Iraq. And I love entertainment – being in front of the camera, making people laugh – so putting that together with something I love is just a no brainer.

Honestly, the troops don’t get paid what they’re worth. To go in there and do anything for them helps because they are underappreciated, underrated and underpaid. In that sense, I’m there for them, but in another sense I’m there for me too. I was brought up with a strong sense of pride for our military. If there is anything I can do for them, I do it.

Was it fun to work with Sesame Street on this?

Absolutely. When Sesame Street calls, you say, “Heck ya!” The Sesame Street brand is timeless. It’s going to be here 100 years from now. To be able to work them, you’re working with the best. It’s like a golfer getting a call from Tiger Woods. I would do it 100 times over.

The second season of your show, Coming Home, which features servicemen and women seeing their families for the first time since returning home from combat, recently began. How did you get involved with the show?

I basically begged to do the show. I’m not above begging. I said, “Please, please let me do this show.” There was a lot of begging involved and a lot of hard work. I wanted it more than anyone else out there. I promise you there is not someone out there who wants to do it more than I do. There might be people who could do it better than me, but no one wants it more than me.

How did Sesame Street end up being a part of Coming Home? Was it fun having Elmo and Rosita on the show?

Farrin Jay (a member of Sesame Workshop’s communications team) really worked hard to put Sesame Street on Coming Home. Total congrats to Farrin for making this thing happen. It was a huge hit. We have 13 amazing episodes. For Sesame Street to be the opener – all of our episodes are good and to me Sesame Street is the best out of all of them.

Carmen and Kevin (Rosita and Elmo, respectively) are really good people and they have huge hearts. That’s why they’ve been doing what they’ve been doing for so long. The kids were head over heels in love with both Muppets. Kids love them. Obviously Kevin and Carmen are professionals. What impresses me is the way they are off camera. The truth is, we film for ten hours and we only show ten minutes. Off camera, they [Carmen and Kevin] are exactly the same. They take time for the kids. The truth is, these kids are broken. Sometimes they haven’t seen their parents for years. I could never imagine what it’s like to live that way. To watch Kevin and Carmen take time for each individual kid even though they are hot, tired, and hungry themselves is amazing. They stick around when they don’t get anything out of it. They stayed and stayed in character. Their hearts were huge.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Helping children persevere through changes and transitions is a critical part of Sesame Street’s mission. That’s why Sesame Workshop, the educational non-profit behind the iconic children’s show, is proud to announce Little Children, Big Challenges, a new outreach initiative dedicated to building skills for resilience in children ages 2–5 to help them persevere through day-to-day as well as more difficult challenges.

Learning from mistakes; making new friends; resolving conflicts: these are the kinds of early childhood struggles with which Little Children, Big Challenges will help young kids cope. The initiative will help children from every background, including those of military and veteran families, remain resilient while working through these and other challenges.

The bilingual (English/Spanish) initiative will feature online, interactive resources for parents and children, as well as the “What We Are” anthem, which you can watch above. The anthem will be performed live by the Quantico Marine Corps band, Sesame Street’s Gordon, Elmo and Rosita, and Matt Rogers, the host of Lifetime’s Coming Home, at a special event aboard the Intrepid this Saturday, May 26.

Major support for Little Children Big Challenges is provided by BAE Systems, Inc. Generous support is provided by The Prudential Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the USO, and Military Child Education Coalition.

To learn more about how Sesame Workshop is helping children build resilience, visit Sesame Street’s military families website or the Little Children, Big Challenges page at SesameStreet.org, which will launch Friday.

The Sesame Workshop Blog