I suspect there may actually have been research or serious theorizing done about this, but if not, this is probably MPSIMS material. My apologies if so.
Here’s the thing: For a year and a half, my kid almost never watched any TV. One morning, on a whim, I switched on the TV and showed him sesame street. He was generally uninterested.
Then Elmo appeared.
And my kid was immediately, hopelessly, shamelessly in love.
He now can not get enough of Elmo. He gets very, very excited whenever he sees Elmo merchandise wherever we go.
I didn’t do anything to encourage this. Elmo just seems to have some kind of magical power.
I’ve heard this kind of thing before, but it was scary to experience it for myself.
My question is, do we know anything about why kids have this reaction to the Elmo figure? Any reputable psychological or even neurological or even evolutionary theories as to why this should be?
I’m not aware of any abstruse psychological theories or explanations for it, but it’s immediately and abundantly clear to me as the mother of three (now fortunately grown, but who did their time in front of PBS) that preschoolers identify with Elmo as a peer: he’s their age. He talks (and giggles) like them in a high-pitched “baby” voice and he responds to situations exactly like a two- or three-year-old would, unlike Ernie, who is more of a Big Kid with his deeper voice and his “big kid” responses to things, or Big Bird, who is more of the friendly adult.
It’s not just toddlers, the little rascal makes me laugh almost every time I hear him talk, or giggle. Laughing feels good and I’m not going to analyze it.
Kevin Clash, who performs Elmo, has recently written a book, an autobiography of sorts about how Elmo has affected his life and what he has learned from performing him these past twenty years or so.
It’s quite a nice read, and he does delve a little bit into how children just seem to respond to Elmo because he is a lot like children, with his sense of innocence and curiosity, and his intelligence level matches theirs too. They just relate to him better than they would to meaningless weird stuff like Tellytubbies or adult characters like Bob the Builder.
No quarrel with anything else you’ve said, but if Big Bird is supposed to be a “friendly adult,” they’ve seriously changed things. As I understand it, he’s more of a 6-year-old, and in the early, pre-Elmo days, he was the one that kids were expected to identify with. Then Elmo came along and they started aiming Sesame Street at a younger audience.