The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,43

famous Muppets were created for ad campaigns: Big Bird is really a variation of a seven foot dragon created by Henson for La Choy commercials; Cookie Monster was a pitchman for Frito Lay; Grover was used in promotional films for IBM. (Henson’s Muppet commercials from the 50s and 60s are hysterically funny but have a dark and edgy quality that understandably was absent from his Sesame Street work.)

“I think the most significant format feature in a commercial is that it’s about one thing,” said Sam Gibbon, one of the earliest Sesame Street producers. “It’s about selling one idea. The notion of breaking down the production of Sesame Street into units small enough so they could address a single educational goal like an individual letter owed a lot to that technique of commercials.”

But is the commercial theory of learning true? Daniel Anderson says that new research suggests that children actually don’t like commercials as much as we thought they did because commercials “don’t tell stories, and stories have a particular salience and importance to young people.” The original Sesame Street was anti narrative: it was, by design, an unconnected collection of sketches. “It wasn’t just the ads that influenced the early Sesame Street,” Anderson says. “There was also a theoretical perspective at the time, based in part on [the influential child psychologist] Piaget, that a preschool child couldn’t follow an extended narrative.” Since the late 1960s, however, this idea has been turned on its head. At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. “It’s the only way they have of organizing the world, of organizing experience,” Jerome Bruner, a psychologist at New York University, says. “They are not able to bring theories that organize things in terms of cause and effect and relationships, so they turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection. If they don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.”

Bruner was involved, in the early 1980s, in a fascinating project—called “Narratives from the Crib”—that was critical in changing the views of many child experts. The project centered on a two year old girl from New Haven called Emily, whose parents—both university professors—began to notice that before their daughter went to sleep at night she talked to herself. Curious, they put a small microcassette recorder in her crib and, several nights a week, for the next fifteen months, recorded both the conversations they had with Emily as they put her to bed and the conversations she had with herself before she fell asleep. The transcripts—122 in all—were then analyzed by a group of linguists and psychologists led by Katherine Nelson of Harvard University. What they found was that Emily’s conversations with herself were more advanced than her conversations with her parents. In fact, they were significantly more advanced. One member of the team that met to discuss the Emily tapes, Carol Fleisher Feldman, later wrote:

In general, her speech to herself is so much richer and more complex [than her speech to adults] that it has made all of us, as students of language development, begin to wonder whether the picture of language acquisition offered in the literature to date does not underrepresent the actual patterns of the linguistic knowledge of the young child. For once the lights are out and her parents leave the room, Emily reveals a stunning mastery of language forms we would never have suspected from her [everyday] speech.

Feldman was referring to things like vocabulary and grammar and—most important—the structure of Emily’s monologues. She was making up stories, narratives, that explained and organized the things that happened to her. Sometimes these stories were what linguists call temporal narratives. She would create a story to try to integrate events, actions, and feelings into one structure—a process that is a critical part of a child’s mental development. Here is a story Emily told herself at 32 months, which I will quote at length to emphasize just how sophisticated children’s speech is when they are by themselves:

Tomorrow when we wake up from bed, first me and Daddy and Mommy, you, eat breakfast eat breakfast like we usually do, and then we’re going to play and then soon as Daddy comes,