Department of Defense Deploys Muppets

AUGUST 26, 2010
The Muppets' Military Mission

By LAURA LANDRO
It's a Muppet family picnic in the park, but Elmo is sad and confused: His Uncle Jack won't be there, because he's dead, and Elmo can't quite grasp that he's never coming back. For Elmo's moptop cousin Jesse, it's hard to even talk about the loss: Jack was her dad.

The story line may seem highly unusual for "Sesame Street," but when Elmo and friends aren't on their day job being cute, colorful and cuddly, they've taken on another mission: helping children of military families struggling with loss, grief and fear.

With some deep-pocketed sponsors like Wal-Mart, Sesame Workshop has been steadily expanding a program called "Talk, Listen, Connect" aimed at kids of all ages, including the youngest and most vulnerable. More than two million U.S. children have been affected directly by a parent's military wartime deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan; 40% of these children are younger than 5 years old.

According to the Defense Department, in the past 8½ years more than 12,000 military children have experienced the death of a parent. Research shows that even the toll of military deployments is steep; a study last year by the Rand Corp. found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in the general population, and that the longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the more likely their children were to have difficulties in school and at home.

Gary Knell, president of Sesame Workshop, says the initial inspiration came from a story he read on a train five years ago about a family that lost its home because it fell behind on mortgage payments while the father was deployed in Iraq. "I just was so sick of seeing all these 'support the troops' posters when we were allowing things like this to happen," he says. The needs of military families also struck a chord with Sesame Workshop Executive Vice President Sherrie Westin, whose brother is an Army reserve officer now serving in Afghanistan.

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The Muppets Military Mission