What to put on for a four-year-old
Four is when you start getting asked whether something really happened. That is not a small thing. A four-year-old has enough imagination to picture where a story might go and not yet enough footing to know what it can do, so tension lands harder than it did a year earlier and stays longer afterwards.
Here is what we hold that takes that into account.
The long ones
Caillou runs to eighty-six episodes, which makes it the deepest set for this age we have. It is domestic almost to a fault — a haircut, a lost toy, a new baby — and nothing in it escalates.
Bedtime stories is close behind at eighty-five, and is shaped to slow a child down rather than wake them up.
Shorter, and familiar
- Curious George — fourteen. A small problem, curiosity, and a consequence that is never punishment
- Disney Junior — thirty
- Kiddos Learn — thirty-one
- Learning letters — twenty-seven, which is the age this starts to stick
Songs
The Disney classics run to sixty-eight. Worth knowing that a four-year-old will often take a song from a film they have never seen and be perfectly happy with it.
What the "is that real?" question is worth
It is worth answering every time, and the answer is allowed to be boring. The research on children and media keeps landing in the same place: what a child takes from a screen depends less on what was on it than on whether there was someone to talk about it with. At four, that conversation is most of the value.