Sesame Street Divorce - Abby Cadabby shows Gordon drawings of her two houses: the one where she lives with her mother and the one where she lives with her father.
Little Kids, Big Challenges: Divorce is a Sesame Street video and resource kit released online on December 10, 2012, with the full video available online the following day, December 11. Like other video resource kits, it is also in the process of being made available on DVD to military families and the general public through various family courts, counseling centers, parenting and childcare programs, and related outlets.
Sesame Street Divorce
The 22 minute video features Elmo, Rosita, Gordon and Abby Cadabby. Abby explains that her mother and father are divorced and she shares the emotions she has been feeling.
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The video assets and supporting materials are part of Sesame Workshop's Little Kids, Big Challenges resilience initiative. The bilingual multimedia initiative aims to help children increase self-awareness, strengthen self-esteem and persevere through change.
The video is the show's second attempt to explain the subject of divorce. They had previously tried to show Snuffy's family going through the turmoil of a divorce in an unaired 1992 episode, "Snuffy's Parents Get Divorced", but this failed in the testing phase as the emotions depicted were too realistic, leaving audiences upset test. The producers took a different tack in crafting this project, focusing on how Abby got through her divorce instead of going through the process.
The online set also includes mp3 downloads of "Bird Family" and "Big Feelings" from the video. Over the years, Sesame Street stories have tackled life issues as diverse as death, adoption, marriage, and birth, often inspired by national statistics or events within the show's cast and crew circle . In 1992, the subject of divorce was a major draw in the season, resulting in an unedited episode in which Mr. Snuffleupagus's mother and father (and his sister Alice) get divorced.
The decision to address the divorce issue was a difficult one for the Children's Television Workshop, and the idea took a long time to conceive. As early as 1989, writer/director Jon Stone announced that he was looking into the matter:
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“We consciously decide what to watch. My two projects this year are drugs and divorce. Divorce is hard. Maybe we could do it with dolls. I'm also writing a screenplay about drugs and peer pressure.[1]”
Other crew members and actors had mixed opinions on the matter, even before the script was written. Indeed, in 1990 executive producer Dulcy Singer initially vetoed it. Singer tackled more complex social issues, but also wanted to highlight primarily issues affecting lower socioeconomic groups, returning to the show's original target audience of underprivileged families and inner cities. He resisted the idea, arguing that "divorce is a bourgeois thing", instead preferring a story that illustrated a single parent family, with a child born out of wedlock and an absent father.
To some extent, this may have been realized in the Sesame Street news story about the bird whose parents live in different trees.
However, the subject of divorce was not overlooked and was revived the following year. The decision was influenced by Census Bureau statistics, which revealed that 40% of all children in the United States, not just the middle class, will soon be living in divorced families.
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Even so, it still required an adjustment, for writers and artists alike. Jerry Nelson noted that "Now we're getting into things like divorce that are probably going to affect young children a lot. We've never touched these things before."
The first hurdle was deciding how to approach the issue in the narrative and whether to use characters or a human cast. Producer-director Lisa Simon publicly addressed the difficulties:
"Hopefully we'll have that by the end of the season. We always need some time to figure out how to handle a topic appropriately, from a child's point of view... It's a little less scary with dolls.. The children have someone to identify with. They see that the puppets have feelings and solve a difficult problem many of them will have to face.[5]"
According to Bob McGrath, the decision was ultimately made to specifically use Mr. Snuffleupagus' family:
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“They once tried to broach the subject of divorce. They knew they couldn't do it with any of our married couples — Gordon and Susan or Maria and Luisa — so they tried Snuffleupagus, writing a show about his parents' divorce. They wrote the whole show and they filmed it, and it was just devastating for the test boy groups. So they threw it all in the trash and never tried it again. It was just too difficult a concept for a three-year-old.[6] ” Test results
The tentatively scheduled air date was April 10, 1992. The episode, intended as no. the script was overseen by the advisory board and developmental psychologists. The committee suggested that the script should emphasize the fact that quarrels don't automatically mean divorce. The script was revised, the story was filmed, and the finished episode was shown before a test audience of sixty children. Dulcy Singer still had her doubts:
"We were very nervous about the show and didn't think it was a competition. When dealing with something like death, the approach can be universal. But with divorce, it's so personal. People react differently. [ 7]"
The final episode addressed the counselor's concerns through a conversation in which Gordon reassures Elmo, Big Bird and Telly that "Just because parents fight or get angry with each other, doesn't mean they're getting a divorce... Or that we don't love each other anymore." He also assured Snuffy and his sister Alice that it wasn't their fault, "No, not even if you spill something."
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The Persuasions, however, had little effect on viewers, especially when taken in conjunction with the rest of the episode. While Mommy Snuffleupagus was a recurring character on the show for several years, Snuffy's father was a more elusive figure; like many parents, his appearances were mostly confined to storybooks. When he appears in the episode, arriving for a weekend visit, Alice tries to introduce him, but he reminds her that "I don't live here anymore".
The children were unclear as to where Snuffy's parents lived, especially his father, and believed that Papa "ran away and that Snuffy and Alice would never see their father again."
The realistic depiction of Snuffleupagus children grappling emotionally with the problem also proved worrisome. In one scene, as Alice hears her parents arguing in the cave next to her, she punches and kicks the teddy bear in her frustration. Singer gauged the reactions, which, despite the attention, revealed both emotional reactions and a misunderstanding of the very points the script tried to make:
“Kids came with negative messages…Kids said he stabbed the teddy bear with a knife. Kids misunderstood the arguments. They said quarrels meant divorce. Some thought Snuffy's parents were moving away, even though we said the exact opposite. Many said their parents would no longer be in love with them.[7]"
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With the test results, research lead Valeria Lovelace advised canceling the episode and going "back to the drawing board," and the idea was abandoned, at least for the season. Initially, there was talk of trying to bring up the divorce issue at a later date, perhaps in several parts. However, as producer Michael Loman recalled, "we ate the price and never aired it. We feel there are a number of issues we can deal with in a family that doesn't go to the extreme of divorce."
A screenshot from the episode can be seen in 40 Years of Life on the Street, which shows the scene right after Papa Snuffle drives the kids to Mom's house. Noel MacNeal voiced Daddy Snuffle for the show. While MacNeal also played Mommy Snuffleupagus, this time he only did a costumed performance while Eureeka's Castle puppeteer Lynn Hippen provided the voice for a "clear female voice".
The topic of divorce was revived nearly 20 years later with the production of an educational video, Little Kids, Big Challenges: Divorce, which debuted in December 2012.
In November 2019, a scene from the unaired episode was publicly shown for the first time at the Jim Henson Legacy event "Sesame Street 'Lost and Found'" at the Museum of the Moving Image. The footage was later used in the 2021 documentary 50 Years of Sunny Days.
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