We are parents of two young children. We built Kids Show Guide because we couldn't find a site that measured and ranked children's TV shows in any systematic way — most of what's available online are short curated lists or subjective reviews. Yet the tools to analyse shows directly — through video, audio, and content analysis — are increasingly accessible, so we decided to give it a try ourselves.
Peer-reviewed research on children's media does exist, and some of it is genuinely informative — we reference it throughout this site. But it tends to focus on a small number of well-known shows, leaves many popular modern titles unexamined, and is written for an academic audience rather than a parent who has five minutes between school pick-up and dinner. We tried to make the relevant findings more accessible, fill in the gaps with our own measurements, and present everything in a format that is quick to scan.
We believe in following the guidelines on limiting screen time for young children — but sometimes life gets in the way. We hope this site will help parents cut through the near-infinite list of available shows, build their own shortlist of parent-approved, calm and educational content, and take one thing off the long list of worries that comes with modern parenthood.
We do not claim that the analysis presented here is the result of rigorous scientific research. We are aware that many factors can influence how a show affects a child — including a child's age, temperament, viewing context, and the presence of a parent — and that not all of these are measurable with the methods we use. This site is not a source of official recommendations, and should not be treated as one.
What we offer is an analysis we find genuinely interesting, and one that we believe gives some objective grounding to observations that many parents already share online. The intention is to give parents more tools to guide their choice of shows, under the hypothesis that shows accumulating negative scores across multiple factors are likely worse for their children's wellbeing than those that do not. The analysis is not meant to be complete, and we expect it to evolve over time as we incorporate feedback and refine our measurement methods.
Questions or suggestions? Email us at hello@kids-show-guide.com.