. You & Me comes from a different era – a slow-moving show that mesmerised preschool viewers with gentle songs, Cato’s colourful outfits and everyday activities like making playdough, stacking sandwiches and even cleaning.
More than 25 years later, she returns to a drastically different children’s programming landscape. Popular shows like Spidey sound and look more like casino slot machines than television, kids can doom scroll snippets of video on YouTube Shorts, and juggernauts like Paw Patrol are multi-billion dollar empires created to sell merchandise as well as entertain.
“…We need a show like [You & Me ] now because life is so busy. Life is so full of stress, and we just need to take a breather,” says Cato.
“And that’s been reinforced by the number of parents who have said, ‘Oh, I wish there was a program like You & Me , like I used to have when I was a kid for my children.’”
Cato and her team have doubled down on the old format. There are songs, a puppet segment, te reo Māori , and Cato participating in everyday activities for children, like in the first episode, which focuses on playdough. The new show has a segment where it films inside a New Zealand preschool, so kids are seeing our country’s growing diversity. The New Zealand-ness of You & Me is a distinct feature in a sea of imported kids’ content.
“If that child is only going to be given a diet of those, that kind of fast-paced animation, then that’s that family’s choice. But we are there as an alternative.
“We’re the veggies, we’re the veggie burger, you know.”
What research says about the new kids’ programming landscape
If you’ve ever thought that kids’ shows today seem way faster and less nutritious for your child’s brain than previous generations, you’re right, says Dr Megan Gath, a developmental psychologist from the University of Canterbury.
She recently studied the difference between New Zealand’s top ten children’s shows in 2012 versus 2024. Shows have increased in pace, which can impact children’s attention span, Gath says. This includes faster storylines and quick edits between scenes.
There is less educational content like teaching numbers and letters. Proto-conversational strategies in shows have reduced significantly. It was and is a key feature of You & Me where Cato asks children questions and pauses for an answer, slowing the pace of the show down.
“That type of style we know is beneficial for young children because it kind of imitates a real life conversation,” says Gath.
A 2024 report from the Education Review Office found that many New Zealand children are coming to school lacking basic speech and conversation skills, with excessive screen time being one of the causes. New Zealand guidelines for preschoolers’ screen time are less than one hour per day of quality children’s programming.
A fast-paced show could increase a child’s dopamine levels, says Jackie Riach, a developmental psychologist from Triple P Parenting. Dopamine is the brain’s reward chemical.
When you turn the show off, the dopamine drops and “the child feels discomfort, frustrated” as cortisol and adrenaline kick in. Cortisol is often referred to as the stress hormone.
“[Children] function out of their emotional brain but [don’t] have the developmental skills to manage their emotions,” says Riach.
What my four-year-old thought of the new You & Me
To start, I couldn’t find the show on our children’s YouTube account and had to cross over to the adult account before I found it. Just getting You & Me in front of a child’s eyes in a sea of content will be Cato’s first challenge. The show is part of an initiative to create “a safe space on YouTube for local children’s content…” according to Amie Mills, NZ On Air’s head of funding, which bankrolled the show.
Suzy Cato on the set of the You & Me remake.
supplied
But once I got it playing, the response from my four-year-old girl surprised me. Within seconds, Cato had my child interacting with the TV, a reaction that doesn’t happen during other shows.
She was waving at her new friend, Suzy. When Cato asked a question and paused, my daughter enthusiastically answered. “Snail! Flower! Whale! Gingerbread man!”
I thought, “Wow. This proto-conversation stuff isn’t just a psychology theory. It’s real”.
When the cameras entered a regular New Zealand preschool, my kid turned to me with a smile and said, “Preschool. I go to preschool”.
When the show ended, she said, “again”, and was confused when I said there’s only one new episode a week. Nope, you can’t binge-watch this one, my little sausage.
But then I had laundry to fold, and I was tired, so my kid went on to watch a hamster navigate a cardboard maze, created by some random YouTuber from who knows where, with zero educational content. At least, she had her veggies first.
