By Shannon Williams
@shannon_scribbles

"No. I hate Daniel Tiger,” my six-year-old son mumbled in protest to his twin sister’s screen time selection.

“No you don’t!” I insisted to him in surprise.

“Yes I do,” he muttered back.

I have a soft spot for Daniel Tiger. It’s one of the kid’s shows I not only tolerate but enjoy. I’ve found myself significantly invested in the character’s storylines. I’ve come up with my own theories about the characters. (FYI Katerina Kittycat and Prince Wednesday are totally hooking up in the future.) And, when you can get beyond the unbelievable and compulsive patience of Mom Tiger, you discover there are lessons to be found as a parent, as well. 

There’s also the fact that Daniel Tiger was the first show the twins ever cared to watch consistently, when they were smaller, when I was desperate for just a few moments to myself. 

Caden and Brooklyn were 15 months old when I discovered I was pregnant again. Morning sickness never comes for me, but enormous and all-consuming amounts of fatigue do. Despite almost never using the TV before, I began to force it on them. I tried in vain to get them to watch something—anything—so I could lay on our microfiber couch and pretend to parent.

They weren’t interested. All my “no screentime before two” zeal seemed to have backfired.

Within a few months of expecting our third baby in two years, we were also moving. And my husband worked out-of-state. He didn’t live with us for any stretch longer than four days for four straight months, with our move planted firmly in the middle of that timeline. I needed backup any way I could get it.

I don’t remember how I came across Daniel Tiger, but I do remember realizing the twins were paying attention to it. Their usually active bodies stilled, their eyes glowed. My breath, though not all at one, began to release. First they were taken in by the songs, then drawn into the storyline for minutes at a time. Little by little, their interest grew. This is when they learned to embrace Daniel Tiger, half an episode at a time that fall, while my belly grew with their sibling and I learned to pack up our apartment in twelve-minute spurts.

***

One day, the summer before fifth grade, I walked out our front door to bike to my friend’s down the street. I yelled up the stairs, “Mo-om! I’m going to Julie’s house!”

“Aren’t you going to bring your Barbies with you?” my mom called down. She sat on the couch upstairs in our split-level. I could just see her through the railing, sitting on our brown, tweed-y couch, talking to one of her many sisters on the phone.

“No,” I told her, with more disdain than I meant, “We don’t play with Barbies anymore.”

“Well,” she said, expressing her surprise to whichever sister was on the phone, “Apparently they don’t play with Barbies anymore.”

People, I was ten. I had probably “stopped playing” with Barbies the week before.

***

We moved when the twins were 20 months old and I was 20 weeks along with their sibling. They decided it would be a good time to start waking up at 5:15 every morning. I learned to balance my laptop on the end of our bed, to pull up Daniel Tiger as they lay with me and my belly, and tried to rest until a normal morning hour under the glow of the screen. We’d moved from a small apartment to a house twice the size. The master bedroom felt cavernous as the light from my laptop bounced around the bare walls.

 

A few months later, their brother was born. Tyson worked from home now. Life returned to some sense of normal. And Caden and Brooklyn would watch entire episodes of Daniel Tiger before boredom set in, giving me a solid twenty-five minutes to nurse and lay their brother down to sleep. Daniel Tiger got us through the day when I needed time to deal with our house and a newborn instead of double the amount of two-year-olds. The day it was announced Daniel Tiger would be removed from Netflix I asked Tyson in exasperation, “But how do they expect me to parent?”

Daniel Tiger had become integrated into our day as their little voices sang jingles around the house. We began potty training to the tune of “If you have to go potty, stop! And go right away.” (Which is definitely in the running for The Greatest Daniel Tiger Ditty of All Time.) We sang, “We’ve got to try a new food because it might taste go-ood!” almost every night at dinner. Brooklyn to this day often sings, “Gro-own-ups come back” when my husband and I leave for date night.

We met Daniel Tiger at our local PBS station for “Neighbor Day” that spring after Nolan was born. It was our first real outing after his birth—he was only a month old. He slept in the baby carrier on my chest as Caden and Brooklyn approached the giant-size Daniel with caution. We repeated that trip three more times, each time growing bolder as they met Daniel Tiger all over again every spring. 

“It’s probably the last time they’ll care to go,” I told Tyson last year with tears behind my eyes as I signed us up again. The twins were five and Nolan was three, and he’d never claimed Daniel like his older brother and sister did. I couldn’t imagine they’d want to attend Neighbor Day the following year, at the ages of six and four. As it was, that last time, they towered over the smaller kids who made up the majority of the event, little two-year-olds toddling around like Caden and Brooklyn had barely a few years before.

 ***

Caden has made a habit of disowning his previous passions. At six-years-old, Batman has gone by the wayside just like Daniel Tiger.

“I don’t like Batman anymore,” he informed me recently. “I only like Ninjago now.”

“You can like both!” I insisted. But I know him and his one-track, obsessive mind. It can only handle one compulsion at a time. I want to remind him of the Batcave LEGO set he saved $100 for the summer he was only 4-years-old, by selling lemonade and collecting spare change from all four grandparents. Or the books he read and memorized, how he can school anyone we know on Batman villains and gadgets and trivia. Mere weeks ago he insisted to several people in our neighborhood that the Mad Hatter was a Batman villain. We were all skeptical.

“The Mad Hatter is in Alice in Wonderland!” a neighbor girl told him. Still, Caden held firm. “Do you mean the Riddler?” I asked, when he described a bad guy in green who wore a hat.

Later, I found him paging through 5-Minute Batman Bedtime Stories.

“Look!” he showed me once he’d found the page, “Right there! See?” And he was right. Right there was the page labeling the Mad Hatter as a Batman villain.

Still, he insists he’s done with Batman. I store Batman away in this drawer in my mind, tucked away with care just as Daniel Tiger is. I wonder how long we have until Ninjago joins them there.

***

Sometimes I see the little boy Caden is and how that translates into the bigger boy he’s becoming. He’s interested in video games and playing Minecraft. He sings songs from Fortnite and I don’t even know what that is. I see his impressive LEGO skills and, like most parents, wonder about his future, whether the little bricks he plugs together in such specific configurations actually portend a career as an engineer or an architect.

Did my mom see that, the summer I professed disdain for the Barbie dolls I’d been playing with just a moment before? That summer before fifth grade, I was barely a year away from getting my period, from the transition to middle school, from shooting up to the height I am now. I was on the brink of everything.

Not long ago, we were scrolling through Amazon Prime as all three kids tried to agree on a show to watch. 

“Hey look!” Caden said with excitement, “There’s a new season of Daniel Tiger!” I raised my eyebrows and suppressed a smile.

“Yeah!” Brooklyn and Nolan shouted in excitement next to him.

“Well, we have to buy it,” I told them only semi-reluctantly, though usually I would insist they pick something already available on one of our many subscriptions. Nostalgia got me this day. “Is this something you all agree on?”

They nodded eagerly. So that afternoon I purchased, for $9.99, a piece of their childhood. And we sat down to watch.

I watched them more than I watched the show as they huddled together under blankets, eyes glowing once again. I realized we’re all growing, and leaving something behind as we do. It’s more obvious in our children as they move through their stages: exchanging crawling for walking, training wheels for two-wheels, and, yes, Daniel Tiger for Ninjago. We ourselves may have traded high heels in for spit-up and Maybelline for wrinkle cream. Evolutions we don’t always realize until we’ve passed through and moved on. But aren’t we all, also, always on the brink of something new?

Guest essay written by Shannon Williams. Shannon is a writer, reader, Minnesota native, and Enneagram 1. She believes firmly in the power of iced coffee, pedicures, and, yes, a well-placed Daniel Tiger jingle. Her work has been featured on Motherwell and Kindred Mom and she's a regular contributor to the Twin Cities Mom Collective. You can find her writing about motherhood and life at shannonscribbles.net and on Instagram.

Photo by Ashlee Gadd.