Building Learning Principles for Preschool Video: Our Process with Moonbug

Written By The Center for Scholars & Storytellers

“All Television is Educational. The Question is: What is it Teaching?”

Nicholas Johnson, Former FCC Commissioner and author of 

How to Talk Back to Your Television Set

Nicolas Johnson made this statement in the early 1970s when he was FCC Commissioner. A decade earlier, Newton Minow, then FCC Chairman, had famously called television a "vast wasteland." Inside the same agency, the two were arguing different versions of the same worry. Minow was condemning what TV had become, which he said was mostly formula and filler. Johnson was naming something harder: not the harms TV was doing, but the good it was failing to do. 

One person who took this question seriously was Joan Ganz Cooney. She recognized television’s potential and created Sesame Street. This one show has taught millions of preschoolers around the world to be school ready while also sustaining itself as a brand for over fifty years! This remarkable feat was not done by accident. Joan worked with developmental psychologists and advertising creatives to build something engaging that genuinely shaped its young audience. 

Johnson was right to question what young people were learning from television in the 1970s, and his concerns remain valid today. In fact, one can make the argument that they are even more important. Young people today are not just watching television. They are inside a continuous narrative environment, on YouTube, in games, in long-form streaming, and more. The question is not whether kids are being shaped by stories. The question is which stories they are learning from, and what those stories are teaching.

In 2023, Moonbug, the company responsible for shows such as CoComelon and Blippi, which are watched by millions of children around the world, asked us to help them build a developmentally rigorous foundation that aligned with their content. To their credit, they recognized something many kids’ entertainment companies miss: real expertise in child development is not something you can pick up casually or fold into another role. It takes years of training, direct work with children, and it has its own literature and methods. Translating that expertise into a process a creative team can actually use takes collaboration with those who deeply understand child development and have done the work before.

What followed was several years of close collaboration with Moonbug's creative teams, an advisory council of child development experts, and a comprehensive review of the research on how young children learn from media. The results were four Learning Principles that now serve as the guideposts for how Moonbug develops content across multiple franchises. 

Other preschool creators have asked about the process. Here it is.

How did we develop the Learning Principles?

We started by watching and listening. For several months before any framework existed, we interviewed many people across creative, executive, and production roles at the brand, and we watched their shows. Principles parachuted in from outside the creative process tend to sit on a shelf. Principles that build on what creators are already doing get used.

From there, we assembled an advisory council of academic experts, such as Dr. Bradley Bond, and industry veterans, such as Jill Sanford. Our academic council members have spent their careers researching questions such as how children learn from media, how they form parasocial relationships with characters, and how parents and children co-view together, among many others.

The council reviewed selected episodes and gave us detailed notes. In parallel, we did a comprehensive review of existing academic frameworks for young children's media. The four principles emerged from where our team and the council's read of the content overlapped with what the broader research consistently shows.

The longer framework includes full definitions, citations, and concrete tips for each principle. Here is a short version of each.

1. Navigating Real Life Moments. Preschoolers face new experiences all the time: doctor visits, first days of school, learning to brush their own teeth. Stories that walk children through these moments concretely, with clear visuals and dialogue rather than only song or abstraction, help them prepare for and process their own lived experiences. A story that appropriately paces the steps of a bedtime routine in a narrative, and does so in such a way that a child can recognize, lands more than only singing about going to bed.

2. Modeling Positive Relationships. Young children develop language and social-emotional skills in part by watching how characters talk to each other, listen, fight, and repair. Content that shows children naming a wide range of emotions, and adults helping them work through those emotions, matters more than is often appreciated. A scene where two friends get frustrated with each other and name the feeling out loud before working it out is doing more developmental work than one where the disagreement is skipped or resolved off-screen.

3. Promoting Learning Through Play. Play is how preschoolers learn. Content that models curiosity, imagination, and accessible activities children can recreate at home does more for development than content that tries to drill facts. A character building something out of household objects, getting it wrong, and trying again is showing children that curiosity is a process rather than a flash of inspiration.

4. Telling Authentically Inclusive Stories. Children begin valuing identities very early, in some cases as infants. Centering characters from a wide range of backgrounds, giving their cultures depth, and avoiding stereotyped portrayals shapes how children see themselves and others. A character's culture working its way into everyday details, like the food at the table, the language between family members, or meaningful holidays and traditions, does far more than a one-off "diversity episode" that resets the world to a default afterward.

How do you put learning principles into practice?

Principles do not change content on their own. The principles must be transformed into practice and we are currently building infrastructure that around them to support the entire creative team. This process is threefold. 

First, we aligned around shared language. This ensures that every team, from creative to production to communications, works from the same foundation.  For example, we use "learning" rather than "educational" because preschool children are primarily engaged in social and emotional development, and "educational" tends to imply narrower academic outcomes that are not the heart of what most preschool content can do. We use "framework" rather than "curriculum" for the same reason. Curriculum suggests fixed academic outcomes; a framework supports flexible, story-driven development. 

The second piece was creating systems and structure. Each franchise developed its own Learning Framework which sit underneath the broader principles. These frameworks align with the specific format, audience, and tone of each title, and they are developed by a learning consultant working with the creative team. With the consultants, we are also working towards establishing several norms at the company. First, consultants come on at the start of a show, not reactively after problems have surfaced in a finished cut. Second, they review at least three passes of the content across script and cut stages. To note, this is the standard we are working toward, not yet the steady state on every show. Bringing consultants in this early is a real shift for any large kids entertainment company, and the work of getting there is ongoing. 

The third piece was keeping the council connected over time. We meet with our advisors on a quarterly basis, and we use those sessions to let the creative teams pick their brains. The teams bring whatever they are working through: a developmental question about a specific show, a research view on an idea they're testing, something they've been hearing from parents or in trade press. We wanted the council to be a resource the teams could actually reach, not a one-time consultation.

The good news is that other creators who want the best for their young audiences do not have to start from scratch. Over the last several years, organizations across academia, industry, and the creator economy have begun translating developmental science into practical tools for storytellers. For example, CSS partnered with YouTube, with support from many experts such as the American Psychological Association, to create a free guide called Creating for Teens, which helps digital creators better understand adolescent development and apply that knowledge to their content. Resources like these can help creators begin integrating research-informed practices, even when they do not have access to dedicated research teams. 

Where can smaller creators start?

Most creators do not have the resources for an advisory council, a research team, or a roster of consultants. Yet they are still making stories that shape how children and teens understand themselves and the world around them.

At CSS, one of our core goals has always been to translate developmental science into practical guidance for storytellers. That is why we built AskYalda, a research-informed platform designed to help creators quickly access evidence-based guidance while they are developing ideas, writing scripts, or making creative decisions.

AskYalda draws from a curated library of more than 2,500 research insights assembled by our team. Rather than searching the open internet, it provides sourced answers grounded in vetted research, allowing creators to understand not just the recommendation but also the evidence behind it.

The platform is still evolving, but it reflects something we believe deeply: access to developmental expertise should not be limited to the largest companies with the biggest budgets. We are also exploring how this approach can be adapted for organizations that want developmental expertise embedded directly into their creative workflows. 

Our hope is that the future of youth media is one where developmental expertise is as accessible to an independent creator with a YouTube channel as it is to a global media company.

When a creator has the resources, building a process that includes a thoughtful consultant, a written set of principles, and defined moments for developmental review can significantly strengthen both the quality and positive impact of the content while helping reduce unintended harm. 

What young children learn from the stories in front of them shapes how they understand themselves, other people, and the world around them. Research has been demonstrating that reality for decades, with the impact lasting even into the adolescent years. The opportunity for creators is not simply to entertain, but to be intentional about the lessons, relationships, and possibilities their stories model. When developmental expertise and great storytelling work together, the result can be content that children love and that genuinely supports their growth.

Free Resources for Storytellers

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank Elly Keene, our advisory council and Matt Puretz for their thoughtful leadership, collaboration, and dedication in helping develop these Learning Principles. Their expertise and commitment were instrumental in translating research and developmental science into a practical framework that can support meaningful storytelling for young audiences.

The Center for Scholars & Storytellers
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