If you have little ones at home, there is a very good chance that you are intimately familiar with the Cocomelon YouTube channel by now.
The videos are easy to sing along to and hook children in with ease. For some parents, the videos work as an easy babysitter that gets kids to sit still and zone out.
However, there is more to the story than that. We have often wondered why these videos are so addictive for little ones. Could it be the bright colors or animation style? Perhaps it’s the easy-to-remember songs or constant stimulation.
@thecircusbrain has taken to TikTok in an effort to explain it. Parents are definitely going to want to pay close attention to this one. When they were told about the show and how kids were getting sucked into it, they wanted to know why.
“Someone just told me about this show called CoComelon and apparently for kids, it’s like crack. So I decided to look into why it might be and here’s just a little example as to why it might be,” he says. From there, they show the audience a clip from My Little Pony. The show changes scenes every three to four seconds.
“Let’s see how long it takes for each one of these scenes to change,” he says, as he changes over to Cocomelon. The scenes change every one to two seconds, giving the kids zero chance to process what is going on.
In other words, they are being overstimulated. “Great point. We’re raising a generation of kids with no attention spans,” said one viewer.
Evie magazine decided to take a closer look at the theory and when they spoke with various specialists in the child development field, they did not disagree.
“Cocomelon is so hyper-stimulating that it acts as a drug, a stimulant. The brain receives a hit of dopamine from screen time, and it seems that the stronger the ‘drug,’ the stronger the ‘hit,'” says Jerrica Sannes.
@thecircusbrain
She’s an expert in early childhood studies, which bears noting. The dopamine hits that the child is receiving are a big part of the reason why they will lash out when it is time to shut the show off. Of course, some parents argued that there is nothing wrong with the show because it’s so effective as a babysitter.