Sesame Workshop Launches Well-Being Index After Viral Elmo Check-in

“Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?”

The Sesame Street social media manager who posted those two sentences from Elmo’s X account in January couldn’t have guessed the viral moment they had just created. Seven months later, the post has over 165,000 likes, 20,000 responses, and 61,000 reposts, as users flooded the comment section with responses. Some were jokes or attempts to troll (this is the Internet, after all), but a surprising amount came from people genuinely responding to the prompt — and realizing that they weren’t doing so well, after all.

The responses inspired Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, to do more. The nonprofit teamed up with The Harris Poll, a market research firm, to launch a “first-of-its-kind index on the state of well-being in America.”

According to a press release, the index aims to “shed light on the mental health crisis” by keeping tabs “on the well-being of Americans and their families,” while looking to understand “what drives well-being today.”

“We could not have predicted the overwhelming response that followed Elmo’s post,” said Samantha Maltin, Chief Marketing and Brand Officer of Sesame Workshop, in the press release. “The tweet, and the campaign it spawned, reached over 300 million people, with more than 3 million heartfelt reactions pouring in. As Elmo’s viral moment and this new study indicate, the most pressing issue facing American families right now is mental health and emotional well-being.”

As a first step towards understanding, Sesame Workshop released The State of Well-Being Report today, comprised of the results of 2,012 online interviews with Americans aged 16 and older. The responses took a broad view on well-being, from what we need to increase it (economic stability, mental health, and high-quality education opportunities, the respondents said) to what stands in its way. Perhaps the most interesting responses for parents had to do with how we talk about mental health with our children.

The survey found that 67 percent of Americans wish their parents had been “more honest” with them about their mental health struggles, and that number goes up to 79 percent among current parents. That suggests that “today’s parents are looking to break the silence around mental health with their own children,” Sesame Workshop noted in a summary of the findings. The survey also found that 84 percent of parents agreed with the statement, “I wish I had been taught more about how to understand and manage my emotions as a child” — indicating that they may look to help their children learn the lessons they themselves did not.

Many younger respondents also hope that schools will step up, with 63 percent of Gen Z and millennials agreeing that “schools should focus on social and emotional skills just as much as academics.” Among educators surveyed, the number went up to 71 percent.

This shift towards more open mental health conversations is coming at a good time. The Sesame Workshop survey found that over half (51 percent) of Americans think that the average child is anxious, with 56 percent describing fellow Americans as anxious. A recent report from the CDC, meanwhile, found that the percentage of high school students who felt “persistently sad or hopeless” has increased between 2013 and 2023 (though there was a decrease between 2021 and 2023). Female students and LGBTQ+ students continued to experience worse mental health as well.

Still, the Sesame Workshop survey found that Americans want to solve the problem — and that they see the way forward. A whopping 90 percent of respondents agreed that “Nurturing kindness in children has a positive ripple effect, building a brave and caring society for generations to come,” while 91 percent say that “doing kind things for others makes me feel happier.” Addressing the mental health crisis will be a major project to tackle on many fronts, but teaching children to be kind and help others would definitely be solid steps in the right direction.

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