Experts and parents issue warning over huge Netflix children's show that acts like 'cocaine for babies' - as mothers are forced to ban 'Jekyll and Hyde' kids from watching
For more than a decade, CoComelon has played babysitter to hundreds of millions of children around the world.
The saccharin-sweet kids show with hypnotic nursery rhymes and plasticine-like rainbow colours was created by California father-of-two Jay Jeon to teach his two children the alphabet.
Today CoComelon is a ratings phenomen, with its single top-viewed videos on YouTube watched by an average of 1billion mainly pre-schoolers each year.
But despite the show being fairly mundane and based on songs and rhymes going back decades or even centuries, many parents have said their children have suffered symptoms of addiction and withdrawal when they switch it off - branding it 'Cocainemelon'.
On Netflix, the series was viewed for as many minutes - 33.27billion in fact - as Disney+'s Luca, Moana, Raya and the Last Dragon and Frozen II combined.
This success has also made Mr Jeon, who directed TV commercials, and his children's author wife $460million. They came up with the idea in 2006 with their executives insisting that all episodes are planned with experts to make children feel safe, help with their education and encourage good behaviour.
The top CoComelon video about bath time has been watched almost 7BILLION times
The 3d animations often bring to life nursery rhymes and songs such as 'Wheels on the Bus'
Baa baa black sheep is extended to three minutes to include animals of all colours
CoComelon's owners Moonbug have been asked to comment.
One Cambridge academic has warned parents that shows like these can cause 'technoference' - disruption of a child's relationship with parents and siblings due to use of electronic devices.
Some mothers and fathers have said the show turned their children into 'CoComelon zombies'.
One mother told MailOnline that they allowed their two-year-old son to watch the show. But the little boy, now three, would explode with rage when they turned it off so they had to ban it.
She said: 'CoComelon appears to be a colourful, stimulating child appropriate program but the detrimental impact on our son’s behaviour led us to completely ban the show even for short periods of time.
'He became fixated, zoned out whilst watching - which naturally appeals to busy parents with other children or tasks to see to. The issue arises when the program is stopped - the immediate aggression and lack of emotional management was frightening. We had never witnessed him have such a visceral reaction to any other children TV show'.
Taking the cartoon away led to volcanic anger, she said.
'In the immediate, he would throw himself to the floor hitting his fists on the ground, seemingly "coming back around" from the trance he was in', the mother warned, adding that in the period afterwards he was 'generally grumpy and combative'.
Sally Hogg, Senior Policy Fellow at the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge, told MailOnline that while screen time isn't necessarily bad - missed chances for a child to play and learn in other ways can be an 'opportunity lost' in their development.
She said that even babies are now 'interacting with digital media, including YouTube videos, as part of their daily lives.
She said: 'The impact of watching online content on early child development depends on three things: the content of the media; the context in which they are watching it, and what they are not doing as a result of watching it. If very young children are watching digital media, it's important that it's not taking up so much time that it reduces their opportunities to play, to interact with adults and other children, and to be active.
Ideally parents should watch the content with their children, helping their children to make sense of it and using it as a basis for conversation and shared time together.
Early parent-child interactions are vital for early development, and if either parent or child is distracted by digital media this "technoference" can get in the way of positive interactions.
Parents should also be cautious of giving children screens to soothe them when they are upset or feeling other difficult emotions, because talking about and learning to manage emotions is an important part of early development'.
When asked about the often angry and even violent response by some children when shows such as CoComelon are switched off, she said: 'Children do often feel frustrated when adults stop them doing something they enjoy, or ask them to do something they don’t want to. This is a normal part of child development.
'If a child is getting upset at stopping doing something, it doesn’t necessarily tell us about the value or harm of that object or media.
'But if something is regularly causing distress to a child or difficultly in parent-child relationships then that suggests parents should be thoughtful about how it's used, including thinking about how they manage their child's expectations and understanding of boundaries'.
Jay Jeon and his anonymous wife, had been running a children's YouTube channel for 13 years before they re-branded in 2018. They sold it in 2020
US-based YouTube channel Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes, became the first to achieve over one billion viewers weekly
CoComelon founder Jay Jeon's supporters hail him as a 'creative genius' who is 'dedicated' to early childhood education.
Born in South Korea, he had moved to California and began working in advertising - later directing a small number of low budget TV commercials.
When his two sons were in nursery he and his wife, an author, would sing rhymes to them and decided to do basic 2d animations to go along with them, focussing on the alphabet.
Their children enjoyed them so they began uploading the cartoons to YouTube in 2007, calling their channel ABC Kid TV.
Fast forward 17 years, it has around 170million subscribers.
Its number one video is the two-minute-and-fifty-two-second Bath Song, which is the fourth most viewed video on YouTube and watched almost seven billion times in six years.
A baby climbs into the bath with their brother, pouring in soap to create bubbles and wash their hair and faces, all to a hypnotic song.
Its other billion-plus viewed hits include Baa Baa Black Sheep and a version of Baby Shark.
Its creators say that the biggest breakthrough came when they went from 2D to 3D animation in 2017.
In 2020 his production company Treasure Studio sold the show to Moonbug, which has expanded the show and has a huge team working on it.
Views increased during the pandemic, where videos on handwashing and seeing a doctor proved popular.
Its makers claim that CoComelon is good for children and also shows good behaviour
Each episode takes around three months to complete.
Experts and writers have questioned whether it is right that videos are aimed at children who are so young.
Susan Kim, who has written for Thomas & Friends and Arthur told The New Yorker: 'It used to be that there were certain things you couldn’t say, or you’d be rebuked in the room.
'For one, you weren’t allowed to say that anything was for one-to-two-year-olds. I think everyone had the sense, whether or not they’d actually read the white papers on it, that children that young should not be planted in front of video and left alone'.
Susan Linn, the author of Consuming Kids, told Time: 'It’s not that CoComelon is addictive.
'It’s that just about everything on the web is designed to be addictive.
'You’re setting up kids to start depending on screens for stimulation and soothing. What we really want is for kids to be able to amuse and soothe themselves'.
