can we talk about how this fucking pbs show aimed at little kids easily talked about how anxiety is stressful but normal

Ok no but can we talk about this entire episode? 

It was called April 9th, and it was actually a response to the 9/11 attacks. It didn’t talk about the attacks themselves, but rather focused on teaching kids to deal with the all of the emotions that they might be feeling as a result. They set up a situation that might evoke similar emotions in children: a massive fire at the school.

Arthur’s dad was in the fire, so (as you can see above), Arthur is constantly worried about his dad’s safety.

Sue Ellen is grieving because her journal, which contained a huge amount of precious memories, was destroyed in the fire. Muffy is confused why she can’t just cheer Sue Ellen up by giving her a new journal.

Buster wasn’t at school that day, and feels confused and guilty that he isn’t sad about the fire like the other kids. He then befriends the school janitor, who has to retire due to an injury that, at his age, is pretty serious.

Binky actually saw the flames, and is constantly traumatized by the event. He doesn’t tell anyone because he feels like he would lose his tough-guy reputation if he admitted that he was scared.

The episode teaches kids that all of these emotions are perfectly normal and natural, that there’s not one right way to feel, and that even if it takes a while, things are going to be okay.

The thing that makes this show so great, in my opinion, is that it knows that kids are intellegent and strong enough to deal with these things if you present them in the right way. It doesn’t hide them, it doesn’t sugar coat them, it just presents them in a way that children can understand and shows them how to deal with them.

Arthur was a damn good show

Was? It still is :)

To be fair, considering most people talk about the older seasons they grew up with, it’s not surprising a lot of people don’t realize it’s still running.

This wasn’t brought up in the post, or any other discussion of this episode really, which is understandable since the main focus is 9/11 and that overshadows this, but I think it’s kind of important to call attention to too.

What Arthur and his dad (as a kid) are going through here is a symptom of OCD, In real life it’s not quite as easy to get rid of as seeing everything worked out ok or getting a peptalk (Though the disorder had probably not fully gotten to him yet at this point, since it was so recent).

The episode doesn’t really describe it as OCD, probably because they either weren’t aware (Which I doubt given it’s such a good depiction of it and the writers tend to put research into these topics to handle them with care) or they didn’t want to call it such since they’re only really depicting one symptom of it that gets resolved by the end.

But it’s still important to show, because some kids DO struggle with OCD tendencies like this and they don’t *KNOW* about it and may be afraid to tell their parents, but maybe if they saw this it would help them understand it a bit more and confide in an adult who could get them proper help! So intentional or otherwise this is a huge deal for helping with the understanding of the really misrepresented disorder.