Sesame Street’s little, giggly Elmo may just seem like a furry friend of the letters A and Q to you. But to me, he’s the tops.
We have all, of course, been watching the impact that Frankenstorm Sandy had on the Atlantic coast—following its stories of devastation, from flooded subway systems to uprooted landscapes to obliterated homes. But there are a lot of little stories that won’t be splashed across our TV screens. And some of those are the tales of young tykes who heard the storm pounding their homes and lived through its destruction first hand.
The creators of Sesame Street‘s little Elmo didn’t forget those kids, however. And the day after the big storm hit, they sent their cute and cuddly Muppet pal (or the voice behind the Muppet, anyway) and a real-world psychologist friend out to offer shaken children a few words of comfort.
In fact, as they started chatting with WNYC radio show host Brian Lehrer, it came out that the little red guy is an old hand at big scary storms. He lived through one on Sesame Street in a 2001 episode (which the show recently made available on YouTube) that ripped up Big Bird’s nest. And he worked hard to help his friend put his home back in order after that particularly nasty hurricane.
Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, the vice president of education and research for Sesame Workshop, offered up a couple words of advice for the moms and dads listening in. She suggested that kids could even be a part of working alongside parents in safe clean-up activities in their community which would be “very empowering and very therapeutic for the whole family.”
Later on in the radio program, there were even kids emailing and calling in to talk to Elmo, asking if he too was scared during the storm. “Yeah, but Elmo was with his mommy and daddy, so Elmo asked a lot of questions and learned a lot about what was happening,” the Muppet friend assured. “The windows were moving and stuff and they said, ‘Yes, everything would calm down and be OK.'”
It was a relatively short and simple sort of thing. Just a puppet’s voice, popping up on the radio to tell kids that it was going to be all right and make sure that they knew there was at least one friendly voice out there, belonging to a friend even tinier than they are, who was thinking about them.
Media at its best.
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