On the 5th of January last year, PBS announced that they would no longer run Caillou, a children’s cartoon show that had been on the air for over twenty years.
Along with the announcement, they shared tips for parents to help their children cope with the show’s end. However, it turned out that parents couldn’t care less for those tips; they were too busy rejoicing.
But what made parents hate a show that has managed to survive two decades on public television?
What is Cailou?
Before Caillou was a cartoon show, it was a popular children’s book published in Canada by Hélène Desputeaux. Inspired by the French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (known for her research on child development), Desputeaux created a nine-month-old fictional baby, Caillou, with the intention of making him extremely relatable to preschoolers.
Desputeaux was not a fan of children’s books using animals as primary characters and wanted a human figure to be a protagonist for once. She saw Caillou as a medium to help kids develop their unique personalities. Dr. Dolto’s research made her realise that children’s lives are not as carefree as adults think.
Desputeaux wanted Caillou to be a passage of communication between parents and their children. As the character of Caillou developed, he turned from a baby to a four-year-old but still kept his signature bald head.
Hateful reception
Desputeaux stepped into the children’s entertainment market with the best of intentions. She had psychological research backing up her character. But no one could have prepared her for the hate Caillou received.
The series has a pitiful 4 on 10 rating on IMDb; the review section is filled with parents armed with a single star, claiming they have had enough. Common Sense Media displays 2 out of 5 stars by both parents and kids based on hundreds of reviews.
Parents took to Twitter to express sheer delight when the show was finally cancelled. “Brat”, “evil”, “bootleg Charlie Brown” and other colourful descriptions made their rounds on Twitter as parents announced that Caillou won’t be missed. One parent wrote, “This is the one show he wasn’t allowed to watch.”
Why was it cancelled?
A simple google search shows no less than three petitions on change.org demanding cancellation of the show before PBS’s announcement.
Parents were thankful when someone tweeted ‘How to Block Caillou on Netflix. There are multiple Caillou hate groups on Facebook with hundreds of members. Even the NFL player, Arian Foster, is aboard the hate train.
The reason behind the hate
To put it simply, Caillou is whiny, annoying, and a brat.
That seems to be the crux of the argument against this bald Canadian. It’s not just that Caillou is irritating to watch; parents claim that the character has a hold on their children. Kids start mimicking the shrill whines of Caillou, giving up at any minor inconvenience.
A typical episode follows Caillou and his family, his mother, father and younger sister Rosie. Giving the viewers a slice of his life, it usually involves minor inconveniences that make Caillou wail and him act like a generally ill-mannered brat.
In the episode, ‘Big Brother Caillou,’ Caillou meets his sister Rosie for the first time, and after putting on a show for his parents, he pinches her and makes her cry, meeting no repercussions for his actions. At least this was tamer in the book ‘Caillou: Baby Sister,’ where this insolent kid bites his newborn baby sister.
Desputeaux seems to have gone in the wrong direction trying to create a relatable protagonist for preschoolers.
Many episodes of Caillou have been banned because of how he behaves. One such was ‘Rosie bothers Caillou,’ which was banned in 2006 because Caillou was violently insufferable. Caillou shoves his sister out of his room and aggressively talks back to his mother in the episode.
In another episode, ‘Caillou joins the circus,’ Caillou cries because the circus isn’t on the same day but the next. When he realises that crying is getting him nowhere, he picks up his toy car to play with, breaks a wheel, throws the car away, and proceeds to spread out on the floor, wailing and punching the ground in a display of a massive temper tantrum.
This is his usual deal, as the show’s makers picked up this exact scene to feature in the title track, along with lyrics, ‘growing up is not so tough, except when I’ve had enough.’
Caillou cries when people find out he has made a mess. He cried when he returned a scribbled book to the librarian and had to apologise. He cries because he doesn’t want to be Rosie’s big brother anymore, because Rosie wore his favourite t-shirt, or because he can’t go to a parade because Rosie is afraid of clowns. To put it clearly, Caillou cries a lot, and often because of Rosie.
A parody on Youtube shows a grown-up Caillou, still living with his parents and being a general nuisance. The video shows Caillou’s dad having a violent dream of killing Caillou. Caillou dies on his own eventually in the dream due to a heart attack from overeating pizza.
When his father wakes up, he is miserable that Caillou is alive. This aggressive parody has 5.7 million views in only a year of being released. Comparing that with the 1.98 million subscribers of the official Caillou Youtube Channel, there is a significant disparity.
Caillou has a habit of shrieking ‘mommmyyy,’ which kids love to imitate. Parents complain that kids pick up all his traits and can’t be consoled to behave normally after just a few minutes of watching Caillou.
And as an incredibly frustrating cherry on top, Caillou is never reprimanded for his behaviour; he always gets away without even a slap on the wrist. As a result, people all over have declared his parents to be utterly spineless.
To make matters worse, unlike the other shows aimed at preschoolers, Caillou has no educational value at all. The only message it seemed to send to children was to act selfishly and that nothing will ever happen to them due to their actions, no matter how bad they were.
The psychology behind the behaviour
In 1961, Albert Bandura performed one of psychology’s most classic experiments, the Bobo Doll experiment. He wanted to check if nursery school children (ages three to six) will imitate social behaviour from observation. His specific aim was to study aggression, but the research has broader application.
The main experiment group of kids watched a man or a woman come into a room full of toys and proceed to verbally and physically assault a Bobo Doll. In another group, the adult who walked in the room simply played with the toys in a non-aggressive manner. Finally, the control group saw no adult enter the room and interact with toys.
Not surprisingly, the kids exposed to an adult assaulting the Bobo doll imitated the actions when given a chance. Considering that Desputeaux specifically created Caillou to be a character for kids to relate to, there seems to be a glaring problem. No wonder parents complain that their kids can’t help but be whiny brats after watching the show.
In 1965, Bandura tried to determine if praise or punishment could play a role in the outcome of the behaviour. The experiment was repeated in ’61, except the aggressive model was divided into two groups this time. In one, the adult is punished for assaulting the doll, while in the other group, they are reprimanded and punished by getting hit by a golf club.
The reward group didn’t see much difference in the behaviour outcome from the previous experiment. But the punishment group saw a drastic reduction in aggressive behaviour from the kids. The lack of punishment in Caillou’s world seems to reinforce the ideas in children’s minds that violent behaviour was not only okay but accepted without any discourse in the world–a message that definitely doesn’t belong on public television.
Written by Osheen Jain
Edited by Suranjan Das