Completely outside of any ideological considerations, Ms Rachel has a dysregulated affect and is mentally not OK. This would be equally true if she talked about Jesus instead of doing propaganda for Mamdani. Her dysfunction is on a completely different level than politics.
That she very successfully sells her mental issues is not surprising. Such people are often very entertaining. We look at them and feel comforted by the feeling that our own dysfunction is nothing compared to theirs.
Exactly how does Ms. Rachel have a dysregulated affect, her stuff is cutesy and twee to a nauseating degree but unfortunately as a preschool teacher I have to sit through her videos. I’m more concerned that she’s an advisor to a mayor, she has no experience and she ought to stick to making educational videos for toddlers
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They make me very uncomfortable. I don’t understand how people find it entertaining. Same deal with Robin Williams: never could watch the guy without wanting to leave the room or crawl out of my own skin, he was so obviously, transparently unbalanced. Desperately, pathologically attention-seeking. *Why* do so many people like that?
-ethyl
So many millennial and younger women seem to be very messed up psychologically. They amount of drugs they take to feel normal is enormous and has become normalized.
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At least in this clip, her demeanour is not discernibly different from that of many other children’s presenters that I’ve seen.
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Is there a reason why you are so active on toddler YouTube because I’ve never seen a single one. I only heard of this Rachel because she started appearing with Mamdani.
I saw on Twitter that she’s one of those creeps who buy children but I promise I wrote this post before even knowing that.
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I know nothing about Youtube for toddlers, I am thinking of Australian children’s TV from when I grew up, and that I’ve seen on random occasions throughout the rest of my life. All I see in this clip is gentle theatrical exaggeration of a kind that is completely normal for children’s TV.
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She doesn’t like children being murdered, and therein lies the problem.
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She’s clearly very left-wing.
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Imagine if he put on short pants and started lisping like a baby. We’d all say he’s a creep. It’s not any less creepy when a woman does it. Rachel is literally menopausal. Where is the dignity?
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Once you are closer to an adult diaper than a baby diaper, it’s really time to act your own age.
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I think my own mother never baby-talked to me, even when I was a literal baby. But would you agree that it’s common for parents, especially mothers, to talk childishly with children? What Ms Rachel is doing in her Youtube videdos (along with the Australian TV presenters I mentioned) is just the same thing, in the context of TV and video. You’ve made me wonder if things work differently in Ukrainian culture!
In the Mamdani political ad, the audience is different, it’s adult voters. So it does mean something different for Ms Rachel to still be in her “for kids” persona. But I don’t think it’s terribly deep. It’s just as if Marcel Marceau appeared as a mime alongside Macron in a political ad, she’s just maintaining her usual character.
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I’ve spent a lot of time around kids in the past decade for obvious reasons and I promise that I’ve never seen anybody behave like this woman. This is not normal behavior and it’s definitely not normal affect.
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Also it’s weird that this is the second time people refer to get as the mother of the little viewers. She not their mother and she very clearly isn’t trying to market herself as a mother figure. She’s trying to market herself as a slightly older sister. How many moms have you seen dressing like this? Outside of a mental institution, that is.
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The big tell here is that you’re comparing her with a TV show that aired its last episode more than 20 years ago. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a product of a different era and aimed at a different audience. A fairer comparison would be to evaluate her style alongside that of her contemporaries. And I would venture to guess that ALL kids shows for that age group are like that these days, with personalities similar to her. She’s just more popular.
But you hate her for expressing sadness at dead palestinian kids and this hate manifests itself in weird ways like this.
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I have no idea what Palestinians have to do with it but ask yourself, what have I been saying for over 15 years here on the blog about children and screens? Have you noticed that I might have a strong opinion on the subject? A stronger one and much more insistently expressed than an opinion about Palestinian kids?
Can you guess what I really think about toddlers watching YouTube? Hmm, what a mystery. 😂😂😂
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Nah, Clarissa, 100% of everything, even your opinions on screentime for kids, is somehow about Tha Jooz.
(/sarc)
Stringer: life gets better when you make the lodestone of your life something positive.
Clarissa: I wonder if it’s partly a household-culture thing. My parents were vehemently against “baby talk” in any way shape or form, and firmly believed that we should talk to children with exactly the same vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation we would use with other adults we respect. They also very intentionally did not have a TV. So… the whole Barney/Wiggles/MsRachel thing: extremely culturally alien to us, and on the few occasions people talked to us like that IRL when we were kids, we pretty much backed out of the room because this person was obviously some kind of psycho. Same reaction we had to mall santas and circus clowns, actually.
-ethyl
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That’s exactly my approach to talking to kids. As a result, my daughter has college-level vocabulary and yes, she hates mall santas. My kid doesn’t watch YouTube but I’ve seen my fair share of daycare and preschool teachers and none of them behaved like this Ms Rachel.
As for Palestinian kids, we’ve all observed me express very strong opinions on a trillion subjects. If I really cared deeply about this, why would I conceal it? What would be the logic behind keeping this one thing to myself?
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life gets better when you make the lodestone of your life something positive.
Life also gets better when you’re not a sanctimonious HR lady dispensing unsolicited life advice But here we are.
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“aired its last episode more than 20 years ago. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a product of a different era”
He quite deliberately chose something very different than the frenetic pace and crazy costumes that were children’s programming back then. He even has some episodes that include silence, just watching the fish. This was not at all standard and he had to fight for what he thought children needed, not what executives and advertisers wanted. Miss Rachel is more a return to the early days of children’s tv when it was assumed that the crazier it was, the better it would catch children’s attention. It’s not that kids wouldn’t respond to Mr Rogers’ approach now, it’s that no content producers care more about kids than about monetizing.
“Motherese” has been studied quite a bit; some form of “baby talk” does show up across languages/cultures as a natural way of teaching speech through slower pace and emphasis that fades out as the child gets older. But *motherese* is not *random stranger-ese.*
A
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That’s exactly what I’m saying. She’s not the mommy. All kids are different and mommies know the best way to talk to their kid. Which has nothing to do with this weirdo of a person.
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Well, we can agree on Mr. Rogers, at least. When my kids were much smaller, they were watching old footage of Mr. R. and answering his questions as if he were speaking directly to them. It’s a style that for many is “out of date” now, but kids recognized him as an adult, being himself (even when singing), and being genuinely interested in children and what they thought.
I am not sure this is related, but I used to find (when I lived in the US) intonations of some white women speaking to their children, especially in the Midwest and in the South, quite weird and exagerrated…
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THEIR children. Not somebody else’s.
Besides, Ms Rachel is almost my age and looking every second of it. The outfit and the affect of a bright 5-year-old is creepy.
I wouldn’t be able to dress my 9-year-old like this even in return for unlimited squish mellows.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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