Muppets Hit the [Sesame] Street to Help Military Children

Most days on Sesame Street are sunny with the clouds chased away (cue theme song), but the beloved, long-running children's television show can also hit on tough subjects like having a parent in the military.

Sesame Workshop, with the help of corporate sponsors like Wal-Mart, has spent the last few years developing a program called Talk, Listen, Connect. It's aimed at children of all ages and started because of the staggering statistic that "more than 12,000 military children have experienced the death of a parent" since the beginning of the Iraq War. A study by the Rand Corp. found that "children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in the general population, and that the longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the more likely their children were to have difficulties in school and at home."

The Sesame Workshop program provides free resources including books, online videos, websites where loved ones can connect from abroad and more. The videos feature well-known Muppet characters interacting with real children and their parents discussing what might happen when their parents are in the military and are deployed somewhere. They also cover worse-case scenarios including a parent returning with post-traumatic stress disorder, or the unfortunate loss of a parent during combat.

One such video called When Families Grieve has received widespread media coverage, including a special screening at the Pentagon hosted by Katie Couric, which aired on PBS. The program has been welcomed by many military support programs and families that in the past had focused more on helping adults cope with the realities of war and provided very little information about how to best communicate with children.

"A lot of military support programs are more for the parents, but kids really relate to Elmo and Sesame Street," Heidi Malkowski, who works on an Air Force base, told the Wall Street Journal.

The show has truly demonstrated its remarkable ability to help children understand both the sunny and cloudier sides of life once again.

Screengrab via SesameWorkshop.org.