Emma: Welcome to today's episode, On The Corner of Homelessness &: Talking to Kids. I'm Emma Hughes.

Joe: And I'm Joe Ader.

Emma: And today we are going to ask one of the questions that I get asked most often. How do you talk to kids about homelessness? We want to continue to engage with conversation. We want to be able to make family homelessness applicable to children so that they can understand. So today we have a very special guest with us.

But before we jump into that conversation, I want to give our disclaimer. Homelessness is a complex issue. And we often see people choose incorrect or simple answers over correct and complex answers, which is why we intentionally slow down to explore various aspects of homelessness. We want it to feel complex because it is complex.

Now, we don't claim to explore every part of this interaction, but we hope that each conversation brings new clarity to the reality as a whole. So please keep an open, curious mindset as we explore complexity and seek to learn just as we are.

With that said, today we are lucky to have a very special guest.

Joe: Yes, we are.

Emma: From a place that we are all probably familiar with-- Kama Einhorn from Sesame Workshop. As Senior Director of Content Design for Sesame Workshop's Research Education Data and Impact Group, she's developed socially impactful resources for children, parents and providers. Before joining the workshop in 2004, she wrote and edited early childhood teaching resources for Scholastic.

She holds a master's degree in education from University of California at Berkeley. Welcome, Kama. We're so glad that you're here.

Kama: Thanks for having me.

Emma: Absolutely. You've been in this work quite a long time in children's education and whatnot. How did you end up on this journey of children's education?

Kama: Well, like so many people who work at Sesame Street, it's been a dream to serve children where they need it the most in their lives, to meet their needs in so many different ways, and to use the power of the friendly, furry, lovable Muppets who are not only lovable children, but also to adults. Now, we've got multiple generations of Sesame Street fans. So, to do this work, helping the most vulnerable children in our social impact work is an honor.

Emma: Tell me a little bit about what Sesame Workshop is, because I understand it's a little bit different than Sesame Street, as we might typically think about it.

Kama: Sesame Workshop is the global impact nonprofit organization behind this iconic and beloved domestic TV show Sesame Street, as we know it.

Joe: So, what is the mission of Sesame Workshop?

Kama: Sesame Workshop's mission is to help children everywhere grow smarter, stronger, and kinder, and we do that in many different ways. The show is one way. Our social impact work, which lives on sesameworkshop.org, is another.

Joe: In this podcast, we're talking about the corner of homelessness and speaking to children about this topic (homelessness). Can you share a little bit about Lily? Because most [of our listeners] won't be familiar with Lily, I think, especially if they haven't been around Sesame Street for a long time.

Kama: One of the joys of working with Muppets is that we can create new ones to do different jobs and talk to children about different tough topics. We create Muppets, sometimes we call them ambassador Muppets, for particular topics.

We created Lily in 2011 for a different initiative. This initiative was about food insecurity and we did a special called Growing Hope Against Hunger, our response to America's malnutrition crisis. So, this little Muppet girl, Lily, was experiencing food insecurity within her family, and of course, that's one possible precursor to homelessness.

How you doing, Lily?

I'm okay. It's just that everyone else is going home. And, well, I miss our apartment. And now we don't have our own place to live. And sometimes I wonder if we'll ever have our own home again.

Kama: So, we already had Lily, the Muppet, and we thought a natural extension of her character would be to show her and her family having overcome this challenge of being shelter-insecure. And at this point when we meet her, she's on the other side of the challenge. She's in a position to explain shelter insecurity to other children, to share her story and her family's story of resilience, and to offer hope to children. When we have any Muppet speak directly to kids, or we create a Muppet that does that, the main goal is to help children see themselves in that character. We work really hard to create these layered, relatable characters where children can really say, "That's like me. That's like my story. That's like my experience."

Emma: Wow. In 2011, I feel like the national conversation wasn't even fully aware of homelessness for kids and families. How did Sesame Workshop become aware of the need for a character like Lily?

Kama: We're always looking for where the need is greatest for children, and we know there are multiple issues facing children around the world. We want to respond to all of them. We are constantly working with experts, and of course, our own research, following what's happening in the world and where children may be the most vulnerable. So, different topics come along at different times for different reasons, and our work is to find the experts in those topics and to help and to ask them for help in letting us understand what children facing these challenges most need. All of this content creation that we do is based on what we can learn from our advisors, from experts in the field, from what we know is going on in the world, and respond to it in a way using multiple media that can reach children where they are. Sometimes it's video, sometimes it's storybook, sometimes it makes it onto the series, but the work is really to leverage the power of the methods.

Joe: That's great, you know, and this is a big topic. We mentioned this several times throughout our podcast if you're a listener, but there are an estimated 2.5 million homeless children in the United States each year right now. And so to see those kids represented through Sesame Street, I think is significant, especially because this is such a challenging concept to understand, even as an adult. But to try to understand it as a child and not feel separate and excluded I think is super important.

Kama: Yes, and we've learned that there were a lot of resources out there for older children. You know, we might refer to those children as ‘the youth,’ right? But when it comes to early childhood, there are often fewer resources for the topics that we address.

We've addressed tough topics such as incarceration, divorce, grief, financial insecurity, homelessness, food insecurity-- these adverse childhood experiences that are traumatic for children and can really negatively impact the trajectory of their lives. Whenever we address a tough topic like this, it's a matter of finding the right language to explain to a very young child what's happening. When we speak to parents who are coping with these challenges, one of the things that we always hear is: “Just tell me what to say, just tell me the words. I don't know how to explain what's happening to my child, and I don't want my child to be permanently negatively impacted by what's happening.”

So, our job as early childhood educators and as people who use media to speak directly to children is to really craft those explanations in the most kid-friendly language, and we work very closely with expert advisors to do so. A lot of the language that you see in this homelessness initiative comes directly from that formative research, from all the focus testing and conversations with providers and with parents, and that language we find resonates really well with the youngest children. It's often harder to explain to younger children, right? The younger the child, the harder it can be to explain, even though in the end the explanation winds up feeling very simple, and that's what we want. We want it to be simple and easily comprehended by a young child.

But these, as you mentioned, are such complex issues with a lot of nuance and a lot of complications. To find that language is an amazing challenge, and when we land on it, we know we've got it. It's like we don't know what it is until we've gone around the block with it a few times, and then we hit something that feels just right, and sometimes it's handed to us by an expert or by a parent who's been there.

Emma: Well, I love that the core of it is that trial and error with the experts of, "This is how I explained it to my child when I was going through homelessness,” “this is how I explained it when I'm a teacher and there's a homeless student in my class and all the other kids are asking,” “this is how I did it." We can all learn from what works and what had worked and continue to improve and grow in our language.

I anticipate that we probably have kind of two groups of people that are going to be listening to this episode: the first one being parents who have children and are experiencing homelessness. Obviously, that's the power of where I'm excited to talk a little bit more about Lily and what Lily can offer us, as far as that language you have tried and erred through and now have nailed out for us.

But we also have a group of parents, I'm sure, who want to just teach their children how to be empathetic neighbors, how to be those kinds of people that care for the Lilys of the world. How does the language that Lily shares apply to both groups?

Kama: It's a great challenge because we want all of our content to reach all children [and] these are two very different groups of children: those who have experienced it and those who have not. They have different needs and we know that at the core, we want our message to children to be about empathy and building a sense of safety.

When we offer information to parents who are experiencing shelter insecurity, obviously the messaging is very, very different than when we're explaining it to a parent who has not. The commonality is honoring children where they are, whether they're confused about why they're seeing a homeless person on the street, they might be frightened by it, or whether it's a family who's experiencing it in that moment, shelter insecurity, and how we can help parents build a sense of safety and security.

Ultimately, the message is for children. What we want to do in all of our tough topics, whenever we're talking about childhood trauma, is to empower parents to be that person in a child's life who is the most important factor in building a sense of safety and security in the world.

No matter how fortunate or unfortunate a family is, we want to see parents and we do it by showing Muppet parents. Elmo's dad does a lot of explaining in this initiative. We want to show these caring adults reassuring children, whether their situation is more or less fortunate. We want the parents to be that person who can assure children that they'll be taken care of, that there are a lot of people who know how to take care of less fortunate people, and that this is a grown-up problem that children do not have to feel responsible for or feel like they themselves can fix.

Joe: You mentioned earlier about the content and how typically the content around homelessness is for teens. A lot of people think of unaccompanied youth or teens as homeless, but what we see in the shelter here is about half of the children are under the age of 5, and then the remainder are 5 to 18. And so, a large chunk are this birth-to-five-year-old age that is really a good target market for the work that you guys do, but I can see where how challenging it could be to bring these concepts down to that level.

We have a hard time as adults talking about it, explaining it, so I think that's a really interesting point there.

One of the things that we were curious on is how do you determine which topics you're trying to explain as you are working through this with Lily?

Kama: A lot of that comes from our conversations with our expert advisors. Whenever we approach a topic that we are not experts in-- and we are not experts in many of these tough topics that we've addressed, [but] we know how to use the power of media-- but we had a lot to learn about a topic like family homelessness.

We begin by assembling an advisory board of experts across the country who give us a crash course in the state of the issue as it exists and what messages children need to hear. We ask a lot about what resources are out there and what is missing, and we go to providers like [Family Promise of Spokane] and we say, “What do you wish you had?”,  because our job is serving the whole system and the providers who care about children and families. We want you to have exactly what you need. When we talk to providers, we say, "What's not out there? What are you missing, and what seems have been helpful to you?” Like, “What have you done that has resonated with the young children and their families that you serve?"

These conversations can just be so helpful. They're quite focused on the sort of nuggets or throughlines around this issue. The one that came up the most strongly in this initiative was this idea of "What is home?" When we boil [down] children's understanding and experience of their world, what are the most basic parts of children's lives? It's their home, it's their family, it's their school, it's their friends. We wanted to convey this difference between a home and a house or an apartment. So, the message became, and you see this as a throughline in a lot of the multimedia content, that home is not just a house or an apartment.

A home is a place where you are loved and safe, and where you feel like you can be yourself, where you feel taken care of. In one of the pieces, we had children from a homeless shelter here in New York who talked with Elmo about what home meant to them, and they said things like, "my grandma's lap," "my classroom," "my city," "home is where the hugs are," things like that. That's an example of a theme or a throughline of what we can offer children in building their understanding of this traumatic experience of losing one's permanent place to live.

We also talked a lot about having a permanent place to live, because we know that a lot of families with young children are not necessarily living out on the street. They may be in shelters, but they [also] might be staying with family and friends, in hotels, and in cars. They may have a home, they might have a place to live, but it's not a permanent place to live. So, we developed language like, "We're staying here for now," or "We have a place to stay, but it's not our own place,” "We are in between homes." We tried to find language that would help children build their understanding of what's different in their situation while helping them maintain this sense of safety and reassurance as much as the parents can offer.

Emma: So much of the way children learn is through modeling. And that is a double-edged sword [because] when children look at the adults in their lives doing something, or in this case, when they see Muppets doing something, it can feel incredibly isolating if they don't see a representation of themselves. But when they do see a representation of themselves, it almost makes the issue less complex and scary, because now all of a sudden, I see a Lily, an Elmo engaging with this in a way that they don't look scared. Maybe they're having a hard time, but they're okay, [and] I could be okay also. And I love that what Sesame Workshop has decided to do is say something and fill in that gap that those children do have, because I think the temptation is often, “Oh, well, you know, she's three, he's five, she's seven, I'm just gonna pretend like everything is normal. I'm going to not address the elephant in the room.” Is it better to say nothing at all, or is it better to address it in the first place?

Kama: I think there's not necessarily a right answer there. It does depend on the age of the child, and we know that when parents find out about these resources, they will have decisions to make based on their own unique situations and the ages of their children.

We usually let one particular factor inform these decisions: are the children asking questions? Do the children seem to be struggling in some way that they're not necessarily expressing? Children show us what's going on by their behavior, not necessarily by what they're communicating with words. So, children might be asking questions like, “When will we have a home?” But you might also see real behavioral changes and a lot of separation anxiety. There will be different ways to explain the situation to different aged children at different times, depending on what's going on.

And of course, parents don't always have the full answers to what children are really asking. We try to offer things that parents might say, like sample answers, and we write it out just like a script. We always say you know your child best. Consider these explanations and pick and choose what seems right for your child at this time. We [also] try to convey the importance of being honest, but not offering more information than children are actually asking for. If children can ask the question, they are ready for some type of answer.

It does not need to be every detail. We want to keep it as age-appropriate as possible, even though the situation, of course, should never be happening to a child or a family. The lift is to position the answer in a way that will inform, that will reassure, that will be honest, and that will help the child feel as safe and secure as possible in this moment in the family's story.

Emma: Sometimes I think parents probably feel obligated to provide the whole truth. The children may not be ready to receive the whole truth, depending on, like you said, their age or their questioning. And I think that speaking to the safety of the child [is more important]. As you said earlier, this is a grown-up problem.

There are lots of helpers that can fix and that can help here. I'm the parent. I'm going to handle this. What you need to remember is you are safe. I love you. You belong here. We're going to figure it out. And [try] letting the child explicitly state some of potentially their anxieties that are presenting the question in the first place.

Kama: We’ve learned from all the work we've done on traumatic experiences that the single most important factor in a child's life when coping with trauma is the presence of a caring adult who they believe can keep them safe, even in the most adverse circumstances. A parent can model incredible resilience to their children, and that will last their entire lifetime. The children will remember how a parent coped with adversity.

And if a parent can say, “We're together in this, this is not our whole story. Our family can become stronger for this. This is something we'll get through together. We're going to go on to something better in our life story. Things won't always be so hard. I know how to keep us safe. And I'm working on figuring it out, I'm asking for help.”

All of these messages when children see their parents coping with adversity this way, builds incredible resilience that will serve them in their lives when they face other challenges. It’s really an opportunity for a parent to dig as deep as they can in this incredibly trying circumstance and be their best for their child and [eventually], watch their child be more resilient than they, as a parent, even dared hope.

I think children are so much more resilient than we can let ourselves hope for. And [there is] power in that caring adult who can be a steady presence and who can reassure in so many different small ways, ways that seem really very small, but can mean so much to a child.

For instance, we heard [about] one parent who had this strategy. When they had to move around from shelter to shelter, which happened frequently, they had an air freshener, like the kind you hang in your car. And they would keep it with them and tape it up by the child's bed so that they had one small constant thing, like a sense memory that made something smell like their place. Like their sense of home, they could bring it with them.

That was a way of offering comfort, security, and routine. These tiny things that seem like, well, of course they're not a fix for the biggest problem, right? But there are so many things a parent can do: a little song that they sing together every morning, stretching together every morning-- no matter where they are, they can share this quiet moment when they both wake up in the morning and set their intention for the day, name something they're looking forward to on a day that might be very difficult. These tiny little routines mean so much to a child, even if they're not fixing the biggest problem that day.

Emma: One of the things that I hear you saying is, yes, maybe a conversation, depending on the child's age and ability, but also that modeling: model consistency, model stability, model safety, regardless of how you do or don't have the conversation, a child will always need those things. And so regardless of if you are a parent that is facing homelessness with your child, or if you are a parent who's trying to raise a kind empathetic human, those things remain the same. Your child needs to understand that you are safe, that you as a parent maybe are not overwhelmed by this situation and that you can take steps to engage with the topic, with the questions, with the reality, and then model that to the kids.

Joe: Exactly. I do want to circle back to Lily. Lily is this character who has shown up in Sesame Street, food insecure, who later would become homeless with her family, and then find housing again, which is a pretty great storyline throughout that. I'm curious what the response to Lily has been from the children, and also what reactions have been surprising to you in that.

Kama: It's such a pleasure to watch children respond to our Muppets, especially the Muppets who are doing this kind of work. I know that the children's response to her at events has been very, very moving. And, you know, the puppeteers who perform these Muppets have incredible stories of how the children have responded.

And the children do respond directly to the Muppets themselves. They seem to forget there's a human performing those Muppets. We wind up getting a lot of our feedback on social media of parents saying they wish they had had this when they had experienced it [as children].

We've heard from parents who are experiencing it. We hear a lot from providers because so much of the social impact work that we do reaches providers first. We have a lot of community partnerships where organizations like yours are implementing these materials, disseminating them, using them in their work with parents, with children, with whole families.

They're sharing them with each other. So, you know, these may be social workers, they may be shelter directors, they may be teachers, anybody who's serving children in a professional capacity. We hear a lot and we speak a lot with providers who are using this.

Providers will also come in and they'll write to us or they'll tell us in a conversation, “We love these materials. We wish you had something on X, Y, or Z.” And when we're able to do more content, we can develop that because we've heard directly from those in the field that it's missing. We're always so happy when we hear that there's something missing because it means we can make something new.

Emma: How do you think the presence of specifically Lily, who was designed for children, will or has already affected any potential misconceptions that adults or parents have about homelessness? I mean, you are engaging a very traditionally complex and difficult topic in a very intentionally simple and approachable way. How have you seen adults take to Lily?

Kama: The power of the Muppets is always something very humbling to watch because they're able to do what humans can't. They're able to speak to both children and adults in a way that a human adult simply can't do. They have a direct line to the heart and the mind of children and adults. It's actually a very easy thing to do once we get the words right, once we know what their messaging is that we want to get out there to create content that is playful, that is even light-hearted. Even in this darkness, we can bring this playfulness and light-heartedness to the topic. That's what the power of Sesame really is. So, we have this lovable young Muppet whose still got a lot of the innocence and optimism and hope of youth, and she talks about the optimism and hope of her parents and how she got that from them. It's quite straightforward.

Emma: We are in this work every single day, and we are very aware of the complexities because we are actively navigating them as providers. But you're right in that at the end of the day, it doesn't have to be that complicated. It can be pretty simple and our response can also be pretty simple, which I think makes it feel more solvable. It makes it feel more engageable, which is just a really cool reminder for me personally as a person that's in this work every day. But it can be simple. We don't need to let it become this big, crazy thing.

Kama: Creating content for kids really reminds you of that. You go to the most basic parts of being human, right? If our goal is to build smarter, stronger, kinder children, then we're building a better world. And what we teach all young children in so much of early learning and early childhood education is about empathy and compassion and those social-emotional skills of caring, sharing, cooperating, being kind, and trying to understand with empathy. It's such a basic part of the Sesame Street DNA, that social-emotional learning, that it actually applies widely to much of what Sesame Street does, whether it's a general public-facing story about sharing or whether it's something that involves one of these tough topics, which is all about building empathy for ourselves and for our own situations, our own challenges, and for others. What we want to do is to show that the helping, to show that asking for help is an act of bravery. In our parent-facing materials in this initiative, we said that a lot.

Asking for help is an act of bravery, and it models something important for your children: that it's an act of strength. And we want to elevate that. We can speak to children and adults at the same time with those messages. The messages are really the same for everybody, including the helpers, the providers who are supporting families in crisis, the ones on the front lines, like yourselves, who are disseminating this material and conveying these messages, that there are always people helping.

In the toughest times, and we see this in so many traumatic experiences, including natural disasters, there's always somebody who's helping. And when we focus on the fact that there's help, that we can seek it out, that people might come and offer it to us with any challenge, focusing on the human instinct to help and to support others in crisis is so powerful. It builds hope for everybody, for the people who are in crisis, to the people who are feeling empathy for people in crisis, and to the providers who are serving the people in crisis. If we lead with that, that sense of hope and optimism which exists very strongly on Sesame Street, then we're in a great position to begin this work.

Joe: Absolutely. So, you've mentioned a couple of different resources. Can you share about the different types of resources around this topic that Sesame Workshop has produced, and how people access those?

Kama: Sure. Everything lives on sesameworkshop.org/resources. In that section of the site, there's all of the topics that we cover. Under ‘Tough Topics’, you'll see family homelessness. So within each topic-- and there are probably about 40 altogether, some of them are the tough topics, like the one we're discussing-- you'll find a suite of materials. There are videos, videos with Muppets talking to children., and there are also documentaries that focus on humans, possibly a human family, or providers who are helping families.

There's also professional development resources on the site. You'll see a lot of provider-facing materials there. Some of those actually offer continuing education credits. And there are courses, training videos on how to use these materials.

A lot of the materials, of course, are directly kid-facing like the Muppet videos, you know, when Lily is in conversation with Elmo talking about her family, that's the message for kids.

See my special bracelet?

Pretty!

Well, I want you to have one too.

Yeah! That's yours, Lily? Okay!

Well, we haven't had much room for our stuff, but my mom always used to keep a small bag of soft ribbons to make bracelets. And while touching them, she used to always calm me down. And every time that she would make a bracelet and put one on, she would say, we can get through anything as long as we're together.

Kama: A lot of them take place right on Sesame Street where Lily now lives. She's introduced as a new friend on Sesame Street. But beyond the videos, we have storybooks that are digital. All of our resources, by the way, are bilingual, all of the resources on sesameworkshop.org/resources. We have printed storybooks that we've distributed to a variety of community-based organizations to distribute. We have articles that can be printed out for parents, or of course, read online.

And we have printable pages. Some are lists of resources. We have printable coloring pages, which is an interesting format. We call them ‘parent-child coloring pages’. And it's something that parents and children can do together as a way to self-soothe and to calm down. We've heard of shelter providers making copies of these parent-child coloring pages, putting them out in a stack in a waiting area with crayons, and just seeing parents and children quietly coming together and coloring. It's a naturally self-soothing activity. They don't have to be talking.

They can just quiet down and make something beautiful together in the midst of this chaotic, anxiety-filled time. So, that's an example of a a simple printable page. Again, they're all bilingual and they are all on sesameworkshop.org/resources.

Emma: Great. I'm realizing that there's a resource for everyone. So, if you are listening, go check them out. Go check out those resources, because often we don't know when the child is going to ask the question. We don't know when that conversation is going to be prompted. To prepare yourself as an adult before that conversation happens, to familiarize yourself with the tools that are available really sets you up to not be like, “Oh, no, I don't know what-- I'm panicking. I don't know how to have this conversation now.” If you've taken the time to think it through before it happens, it helps you be that safe and stable place for when those kids do ask questions.

What happens in a situation where maybe a child hasn't experienced homelessness and they don't really have exposure to it necessarily? How or when would you know how to bring that up with a child in that situation? Any insight on that?

Kama: Yeah, we were really happy to be able to address this, because so many children see it in the world, right? And they may ask questions about it and they might not.

But parents are aware when shelter and security is part of the place in which they live and when it's part of children's daily lives. And so, we're able to build empathy and to open the communication about tough topics, tough situations that people are in. It's also a great way for parents to build this awareness in their children that not everybody is as fortunate as they are and that we want everybody to have a home, that everyone deserves to have a home, you know, that it's not their fault and it happens for different reasons. It can be very painful for a child to see this. It can be scary. And if the parent isn't particularly comfortable or doesn't know how to answer the questions, it can make that worse.  It can foster misconceptions and fear and that's not helpful to anybody.

So, we offer simple, child-friendly explanations [for] when children ask particular questions, like, “Why is that person sleeping on the street?”

It's a terribly painful question to hear, it's a terribly painful thing to see. And we suggest particular answers, like, “That person doesn't have a permanent place to live right now.” We start with what the child is asking and then we offer simple explanations that parents can consider. It's also important for parents to have some way to honor children's desire to help. A lot of children will say, “Can we give them money? How do we help them?”

And there are things that parents can say and do that will honor that need to help the fellow human. They can do things together. They can volunteer at a food pantry or soup kitchen. They can donate clothes. They can start collecting change in a bowl to donate to an organization.

Whatever works for the particular family, and it can be a small thing. As long as children can understand that it's going to help somebody, a jar of pennies is very, very powerful, right? It's not powerful enough to fix a problem, but it's powerful enough to convince a child and build this lifetime of empathy and support and wanting to be part of making the world better. Teaching those early lessons in an age-appropriate way of the small ways that we can help is incredibly big for a child.

Joe: I think that's incredibly important. We've seen that here as we've done our work. There's a little boy named Blaine who his family drove downtown and they saw homeless folks. He wanted to do something, so he started a lemonade stand in his neighborhood to raise money. In the winter he does hot chocolate. I think he's now maybe nine.

Emma: He's definitely young.

Joe: Yeah, I think he was named citizen of the day by the governor a couple of years ago for some of the stuff that he's done. But this is just a kid that had that experience, his parents said, “Okay, you want to do something. Here's something that you can do.” And he has been doing that for years now.

One of the questions I did have for you is-- and we've mentioned this in previous podcasts-- but homelessness is not equal across the United States. 52% of homelessness exists in just 4 of the 50 states: California, New York, Florida, and where we are here in Washington State. How do you approach a topic that is this important but does have really regional aspects that are much stronger than in other parts of the nation?

Kama: Our research model and research is baked into the Sesame Street DNA. When we do formative and focus testing and we want to measure attitudes about a topic and how we should approach it, it always takes into account the geography. We'll choose different locations based on what's happening in those locations. We often want to look at the differences between rural experience and urban experience. We also test according to income level. We want to get as representative a sample of attitudes and feedback as possible. And often, we'll base our research on a particular topic in a place where the topic is the most hard-hitting.

So, like you just mentioned, that may have been the case. We'll also depend on community organizations to direct us to locations where we might get the most salient feedback.

Emma: Do you see children's media and media designed around equipping parents to support children as a catalyst for societal change on issues like homelessness? What is the role of children's media in making the world a better place?

Kama: I think anything that can help children become, as I mentioned, smarter, stronger and kinder, is going to lead to a strong individual child and a healthy one, a strong and healthy family unit, and then it would sort of radiate out from there, the individual existing in the context of communities and the larger world. And of course, as creators of children's media, we want the world to be a good and safe place for the next generation. We all want that for our children, for all children.

Media is such an amazing way to reach children, and we're fortunate to have these Muppets who can take that on. We can reach children anywhere in the world. We're a global brand and we are active in over 150 countries. Media is informal education-- we're the largest informal educator in the world, actually. So, it's a platform that lends itself naturally to getting out these most basic messages about being resilient, about learning, about being learners. In this initiative, we talked a lot about school and how that can be a place that is the anchor in a child's life, that we're all learners and that kindness and empathy is a superpower. So absolutely, we're a mission-based organization and we want to build a good world for the littlest and most vulnerable children.

Emma: My dad has this great piece of advice that I've always... Honestly, I heard him say it once or twice when I was younger, but it didn't really click in my brain as particularly good advice until I was older. He says, “People always ask me, am I raising children? And the answer is, no, I'm raising adults.”

These children will become adults. And so, what I do with them, how I guide them, how I model for them when they are children, determines who they will be and how they will grow and how they will experience resilience as they age. I am providing structure for children now. But the way that you build that better world is those children will age to become, hopefully, stronger, smarter, kinder adults. And those adults will then pick up the mantle of equipping the next generation. So, making sure you take the time to raise those children, to model for those children is not only helping today, but it truly is helping the next generation and the one after that and so on and so forth. That's beautiful.

Kama: That's really such a beautiful parenting insight. And I think a lot of parents watch Sesame Street with their children. It's designed for co-viewing because we know that when children watch media, the best opportunity is when they're doing it with an adult where they can engage. Ideally this content and the show speaks to parents as much as it does to children. And we have Muppet Parents modeling great, joyful, smart, strong, kind parenting for that reason, right? We want the parents to see that modeling as well and possibly take some ideas from what the Muppet Parents are doing.

Joe: Yeah, it’s been so good to hear the thought process behind going about this topic and how Lily was introduced to help children through this, to understand this topic, but also to help adults understand this and work through it. As we wrap up, I think there's a couple of insights that we heard today that were unique that we haven't always had in each of our episodes. One of those for me was that presence of a caring adult along with this topic to provide that “It's okay, we are safe. We will get through this. We're doing it together.”

I think that resonated with me because most of the time when I think about Sesame Street, I think about the Muppet characters. I don't think about the connection between the parent or an adult and the child in experiencing that media and topic and then working together with it. I think that's a really important point with this.

Emma: There’s so many great tools that people may or may not be aware of. Even if you don't have children that in that early childhood range, there's still resources to check out, that you can learn to be equipped. And you can take some of those lessons and the simplicity of those messages and age it up. It's a lot harder to take adult information and age it down, if you will.

But if you have a 12 year old or a 15 year old and they're asking different or more complex questions, you start with that simple message that Sesame Workshop has researched, crowdsourced, crowd-tested, and age it up with additional data or research. What a great resource. That's what I really took away: there is a resource. Somebody has already done the hard work of figuring out how to talk to children about homelessness. You just have to know where to plug in, find it and then personalize it through the relationship that you have with your child.

Joe: Kama, will you share one more time where they can get those resources?

Kama: Of course! Sesameworkshop.org/resources.

Joe: There we go. Sesameworkshop.org/resources. Check it out. Look at the resources there. If you're interested in this topic, you can always also check in with an organization close to you that is working with families and children. If this is a topic that really resonates with you, volunteer, serve, donate.

If you're in our area, familypromiseofspokane.org is how you find us. But I just want to thank you so much for the work that you do to serve children and creating content that resonates, that not only have could have an impact now, but in months, weeks, generations from now, even-- that could make this world a stronger, more resilient, kinder place to be in. I'm just grateful that you joined us today and that this is an opportunity that we had. Anything to add?

Emma: I have one final question, and it might be the most important questions we've asked today. Kama, who is your favorite Muppet?

Kama: We love asking this question. Most people who work at Sesame Workshop have a very strong favorite Muppet, and I think there are some deep psychological reasons that all of us are drawn to the Muppets that we're drawn to. Each Muppet is designed as a part of ourselves, right? They're playfully normalizing some piece of ourselves.

My favorite is Grover. He was my first little friend when I was born in 1969, and that was the year the show started, so he was really one of my first friends. Apparently I used to go up and kiss the screen when he was on. I think I really was drawn to his combination of sweetness and bravado. I think it was an intriguing combination to me.

But we've heard beautiful stories of people's favorite Muppets. So many children in crisis are drawn to Big Bird because he's so innocent. I think psychologically he's developed to be about six years old. And he's also so big, so they're, they're comforted by his presence, but also, they see him themselves in his childlikeness.

Grover is a big favorite. I know a lot of adults who identify with Oscar, you know, who's normalizing all those negative emotions. Like, it's okay to be grumpy and want to be left alone. And, you know, Elmo came along a lot later in life, so I didn't get quite as attached to him. But I also think Ernie and Bert, I've always been drawn to both of them because they're friends that are so different, but they enjoy and appreciate each other so much. And the life lesson [is] there of having different kinds of people in your life. Differences are a good thing, and a funny thing, it makes them a great comic duo. I've always been a big fan of them as well.

And what about you?

Joe: Oh man, that's a great question. I know that I was a Big Bird fan when I was little. That’s actually one of my childhood pictures. Actually, we did it as a staff—“guess whose baby picture type of a thing.” I was holding Big Bird in that picture.

But I think Bert and Ernie are just fun, and they were always fun. The whole rubber ducky theme with them, too-- I can hear the song playing in my head right now. So yeah.

Kama: Oh yeah. There's a lot of versions of that. You can check those out. There's a lot of fun covers of rubber ducky. The classic. Yeah. I think Ernie and Bert are just the classic comic duo that’s just timeless. Right.

Joe: Our producer [Gwyn] has a Grover shirt on that she is showing us right now. And she was tearing up when you said Grover was your favorite character.

Kama: Oh, he's really so lovable, isn't he? He is also physically more versatile than other Muppets because he has these long spaghetti limbs, like long arms. For certain physical things, he's the one we go to.

Different Muppets serve different purposes in our content, and we have to consider these things. He's incredible to show like, yoga moves. He's done some Grover yoga, which is adorable. And he's teaching young children in crisis yoga moves that can help them.

Well, I want to thank you all for the work that you do. It is an honor to create this material that serves your work and all of the children and families that you touch at the most vulnerable moment in [their] lives.

And the younger the child, the more opportunity for that early learning and wiring, so you're really on the front lines of this crisis. The work that we do is meant to support you and the children and families we serve. So, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Emma: I want to make sure that we thank Kama [and] the team over at Sesame Workshop for making this episode possible. Thank you to our producers, Gwyn Griffith and Cheree LaPierre And lastly, our big thank you is to you. One of the things that makes this episode and this podcast in general unique is that you engage with hard topics and you keep coming back.

So, thank you for being willing to learn and for always staying curious. Until next time, this has been On the Corner of Homelessness &.