Why The Representation of Gender Roles in Modern Day Kids’ TV Shows Is Shockingly Problematic
“I taught my kid about patriarchy using Paw Patrol”
Being a heavily involved aunt to six and four-year-old girls means I watch a lot of kids’ TV.
And it’s not like “back in my day” — the 80s and early 90s — when it was relegated to after school and Saturday mornings. Because the internet now exists, there is an endless stream of shows to watch on TV and online.
Watching kid’s TV with my nieces is both shocking and jarring. Because I — maybe naively — thought that nowadays there would be better messaging hidden within those brightly coloured worlds.
Especially when it comes to the representation of gender roles.
But I would be wrong.
Mommy and Daddy are “the best” in very different ways
There are plenty of examples of traditional gender messaging within kids’ TV but one of the clearest examples I recently came across was CoComelon’s My Mommy Song and My Daddy Song.
For those of you living in blissful ignorance of CoComelon, it peddles repetitive nursery rhyme-like songs set to 3D animation. Hell for parents, but allegedly highly addictive for kids.
The Mommy and Daddy songs each focus on why “my mommy/daddy is the best.”
Mommy is the best because she takes care of cuts and scrapes, makes favourite snacks, and stops vacuuming to play with her kids. She also kindly laughs at her de-facto additional child — daddy — with his “silly” jokes and pranks.
Daddy on the other hand is a master at the grill, reads bedtime stories, takes the kids camping, and changes a flat tyre for mommy.
Whilst mommy gets a scrapbook for being the best, daddy gets a rosette, a medal, a trophy and a tie. And a dinner made by mommy.
This is not CoComelon’s only foray into traditional gender messaging. In another episode, a woman cosplays a doctor by donning a fake moustache.
It’s not just CoComelon. Paw Patrol is another wildly successful kids' show which features a boy and a gaggle of search and rescue dogs, only one of whom is female. The only other main female character is Mayor Goodway who is portrayed as a panicky idiot.
As one Reddit commentator said, I taught my kid about patriarchy using Paw Patrol.
And then there’s Peppa Pig.
Peppa Pig has had its fair share of controversy. Most notably the London Fire Brigade once condemned the show as sexist after it called firefighters firemen.
This is not the only example, and yet this is a huge TV show and a one billion-pound global phenomenon.
I once sat next to one of the creators of Peppa Pig at a lunch. He told me a little bit about his life and it sounded…let’s just say more luxurious than mine. Which is no surprise considering he made £47m by selling the Peppa Pig franchise (and along with his co-creators, retains 5% of future royalties).
That’s a lot of money to make off a show that tells boys that pink isn’t a good colour for a football shirt. Or that men’s ineptitude can be brushed away with a “silly daddy” catchphrase which, as HuffPost contributor Victoria Richards says is:
a phrase that echoes in my house and in homes up and down the country, I don’t doubt.
Victoria has a point. Perhaps shows like Peppa Pig are so successful because both kids and adults can relate to their dynamics.
Art imitating life
You could think, big deal. These are kids’ shows, not real life. A quick snoop around Reddit shows this is a common argument levied against kids’ TV criticism.
Shows like these might not be real but that doesn’t mean they don’t reflect true-to-life themes.
Take The Mommy Song where daddy acts like a big kid and mommy laughs along. This reminded me of a social media post by Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm fame, where her husband Daniel dad-dances to entertain the family.
The post is sandwiched between Hannah’s usual content of parenting, homemaking and farm labour. We never see her dancing (ironically). We never see her acting like a big kid.
And Paw Patrol? The male dogs are firefighters, paramedics and police, all of which in real life are male-dominated careers.
One of my nieces has been obsessed with everything medical since she learned imaginative play. She wants to be a paediatrician. And whilst I’m not a fan of forcing career choices onto small children, I don’t want her to give up a dream because CoComelon tells her doctors should be moustachioed men.
I don’t want her to fall foul of that riddle:
A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies. The son is rushed to the ER. The attending surgeon looks at the boy and says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.’
I want her to be the attending surgeon albeit without the tragic backstory.
I don’t want TV — of all things — to tell her that can’t be her.
What kids watch matters
I get why kids’ TV is so popular. I know how exhausting it is to look after small humans.
Peppa Pig lets me pee in peace.
And it’s not like my childhood Saturday mornings were spent watching TV filled with positive gender messaging.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call this shit out. We must because the reach these shows have is staggering.
Take CoComelon, a juggernaut of a show. It’s the second most viewed YouTube channel ever. In 2021, it raked in $120 million in revenue.
Those Mommy and Daddy songs have 139 million and 111 million views respectively.
Thanks to the internet, these shows have a much bigger reach than anything I watched in the 80s and 90s.
And they’re doing things to young brains. Research has proven that the more four-year-old girls watch TV, the more likely they are to think that “boys are better.”
This is compounded by girls who see a more traditional division of labour in the house. A scary thought, considering household labour falls to women the majority of the time.
It’s no wonder then that when I recently picked up my six-year-old niece from school, she told me a boy in her class said he’s better than her just because he’s a boy.
And why she asked me if that was true.
What kids watch matters. The idea that we can turn the TV off and forget about the messaging we invite into our homes every day isn’t realistic.
Not for adults and definitely not for children.
Thankfully, there is some change in the air. Netflix’s CoComelon Lane features a same-sex couple, albeit to some online backlash.
And anyone who has watched Bluey will know how positive its messaging can be despite some criticism over the show’s “perfect” parenting.
But more could be done. More should be. Not many parents — or other adults like me involved in childcare — have the time or inclination to turn the TV off altogether.
What we can do is call out the crap that children’s TV executives foister upon us through the black boxes in our living room. We need to tell them it’s not OK that the only female dog in Paw Patrol has hardly any lines. Or that CoComelon’s mommy is only good for cooking and cleaning.
So that when we need to pee in peace, we know that we’re leaving kids in capable babysitting hands that reinforce the right messages.
Because I’d rather never again hear my niece ask if being a girl is a bad thing.
Charlie Brown is a British wine pro and niche-avoidant writer living in Portugal. She writes about everything from food and wine to feminism to cultural commentary. More here.