April is Autism Acceptance Month and Sesame Workshop is honoring the month with a new initiative and content.
If you remember, back in 2015, Sesame Workshop introduced Julia, the adorably fiery red hair with beautiful green eyes, to its audience. Julia “expresses herself in different ways” because she is autistic. Audiences and the Sesame Street gang, all of course, fell in love with Julia. Her inclusion was just what the street needed.
Fast-forward to 2023, and Sesame Workshop is ensuring that parents have even more resources and content to help “see amazing in all children.”
“The entire goal of our initiative is to celebrate the joy of being a child—to celebrate the uniqueness in every child while also looking at how to accept and go a step beyond, engage with children who may demonstrate differences through a lens of acceptance and understanding,” Jeanette Betancourt, Ed.D., senior vice president of U.S. social impact for Sesame Workshop, told Parents.com in a recent interview. She continued stating that the new materials will focus on childhood happiness and acceptance.
The new content, called Sesame Street and Autism: See Amazing in All Children, will focus on and highlight exercises on: family bonding, building friendships, coping with the pandemic, as well as routines and flexibility, with Julia right at the center.
“Sesame Street has a long history of engaging children in all areas of their development and learning. We regularly base our engagement on research with children and the grownups that influence their development,” Betancourt continued in her interview with Parents.com. She stated that their goal with this new initiative and content was not to simply create resources and programming that, “are not always focused on Julia’s autism, rather on how she engages equally with her Sesame friends, how she helps others, contributes in her way such as communicating using a tablet, and most of all, shows others insights or activities they may not be aware of.”
In addition to the new programming, Sesame Workshop will also release a storybook called “Julia and the Super Sunny Celebration”. The storybook will be available digitally in English, Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
As the recent CDC report found that autism is on the rise in Black and Brown children, at higher rates than White children, this new initiative and content could not have been better timed to aid parents in learning the signs and seeking intervention/help sooner than not.
To check out all that Sesame Workshop has in relation to this new imitative and much more, visit there website here!
