Sesame Street addresses the issue of drug addiction as a muppet shares her struggles with her mother’s addiction. The tiny little muppet is dealing with this adult issue to attempt to help families dealing with the problem of substance abuse.
Sesame Workshop is the organization that produces the beloved children’s show Sesame Street. Recently, the organization created a series of videos that feature a 6-year-old muppet Karli, whose mother is suffering from substance abuse. In the videos, Karli discusses the struggles that her mother faces because of her addiction.
Karli had moved to Sesame Street to live in May to live with a foster family as her mother was ‘having a hard time’. In the latest video, the 6-year-old muppet can be seen telling Elmo, Abby Cadabby and the rest of her friends that her mother had to go away for treatment and that now she is undergoing recovery. She tells Elmo that her mother had to go to meetings every day to stay healthy.
Karli says in one of the videos that her mom needs help learning to take better care of herself so she talks to people with the same problem.
The Sesame Workshop had said that over 5.7 million children under the age of 11 in the United States live in a household where a parent suffers from substance abuse disorder. That is, every one in 8 kids struggle through this problem. We may inform that the figure does not include those children who don’t live with a parent due to separation or divorce, incarceration or death as a result of their addiction.
Later Karli meets a 10-year-old Salia who shares her little sister’s and her experience as their parents dealt with addiction. Sesame Workshop says that through Karli, they want to tell the children with similar plight, that they are not alone.