Daniel Tiger’s Ballad

The first television show my son Riley came to love was Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

We put on the television when he was little. A curiosity. An attempt at indulging him that at once felt misguided for all of the warnings we’d heard about screen time and like a step toward a kind of independence in taking joy in something that was his alone. Despite his initial indifference, he came to love the show, offering it his full attention, delighting at particular favorite songs, and in time singing along.

Early in his life, we made mention of him watching the show to neighbors, whose own five year old son had watched the show before.

When Heather brought up Daniel Tiger to the boy, he promptly dismissed it. That’s a show that really little kids watch.

Our neighbor was a bigger kid—older, in school and an organized soccer league already. Though very kind and bright, I also recognized in him the vocabulary of a child who’d learned to exist outside the house in a way that was difficult to imagine for our son at that point. The language of shame around something you know you aren’t supposed to let other people know you like, or perhaps more precisely, the language used to distance oneself, lest there be any doubt that you might have ever liked something so profoundly uncool.

Maybe I was sensitive to the point because I’d come to love Daniel Tiger at least as much as Riley, not for plots that could engage my adult mind, but for the fundamentally good messages at the heart of each episode, championing emotional intelligence, generosity, and community. All that, connected to the nostalgia of Mr. Rogers teaching similar lessons to my generation, and the idea that characters indirectly spun off from his show might touch my son.

And yet, as weeks turned to months and months turned to a year-plus, I got a little sick of Daniel Tiger.

I treasured when Riley grew capable of reciting parts of the show--in particular, segments from Daniel’s own monologue during a “Snowflake Day” play. And yet, after watching the same episodes time and again, hearing the same songs that were mostly limited to one or two lines, I soured on it all, leaning into thinking silent, sarcastic jabs at plot holes and unintended double entendres from the adult characters.

Another shift came, though, as Riley’s interest in Curious George and then Frozen superseded his preference for Daniel and friends. With these shows and movies came the promise of more of them to follow and a foreseeable future when Riley might join our old neighbor in suggesting he’d outgrown things so childish as the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

It’s a cruel fate for Daniel Tiger, I realized, to be so loved by those so young, and thus destined to be dispatched of not only through the passage of time, but in a span of time children would only faintly remember. Indeed, while I don’t suspect I’ll ever forget a number of the jingles from the show, I don’t know that Riley will remember a single one of them, at least organically, by the time he’s six or seven years old. So it is that the show arrives at an even harsher reality--that the people who do remember it will by and large be the ones who resent it--parents who gave in to watching episodes far more than they wanted to for the sake of their children, and older siblings stuck with it long after they’ve lost interest.

But then, maybe that’s a testament to some of the good of a show like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. Like a geriatric relative or like a well-loved toy, it may be there for a formative time, and yet not around to see the promised land of a more fully formed child, adolescent, teenager, or adult. We take these people and things for granted while they're here, and may lose a conscious memory of the moments that made us hold them dear.

Still, a piece of them clings to us. In having learned to be nice to others. In having learned to love. In having fun.