Meet Julia, Sesame Street's first autistic muppet

The educational programme helps normalise the spectrum disorder

20 Mar 2017

Enlightening people about our differences as human beings can be artfully done through culture. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, first as a novel and then a play, introduced a wide audience to the intricacies of Asperger’s syndrome from the perspective of family, friends, strangers and the individual themselves. Now, a character that is fully aimed at introducing young children to the autism spectrum is due to hit screens, when Julia the muppet joins Sesame Street.

Having a character that exhibits common traits of autism on the longest running and best-loved children’s television is an enormous step. It means educating children from a very young age, and in a subtle way, that differences can be something to be celebrated not feared. That they are in fact a normal part of life.

"This is a significant step in improving public understanding of autism, and making people on the autism spectrum feel more accepted," Mark Lever, CEO of the National Autistic Society told WIRED. "Almost everyone has heard of autism now. But a much smaller number of people understand what it actually means to be autistic, the difficulties autistic people can face – and their strengths too."

Sesame Street and its creators the Sesame Workshop, have been teaching this for years. Starting out as an educational show for children in the 1960s, it has deftly switched between ABCs and 123s and teaching about issues such as race and death.

The character, which had already appeared in other Sesame Street media including books, will first go on air in the US in April. The show’s creators were keenly aware that they were treading into unchartered and complex territory. Speaking to CBS, Christine Ferraro, who has been writing storylines for the show since the 90s, said: “It’s tricky because autism is not one thing; it is different for every single person who has autism. There is an expression that goes, ‘If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism’.”

The team worked with autism organisations in the development of Julia. The aim was to “normalise” autism “so that when they encounter them in their real life, it’s familiar.”

In a scene introducing Julia to Big Bird, Elmo takes it upon himself to explain why she does not at first respond to a greeting as expected. Julia also exhibits other traits, including moving her arms around when she is upset and finding it hard to cope with too much noise. When Elmo approaches her to play in the embedded video, Julia doesn't make eye contact but he persists and suggests "side-by-side play". In another scene, during a game of tag, Julia starts jumping up and down with excitement - the rest of the muppets join in, and just like that the game is changed to suit Julia in a natural way. Rather than her differences being the source of confusion or fear, the rest of the muppets just get on with the relationship and get down to the important stuff: having fun.

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Julia’s puppeteer was uniquely placed to take on the job: she has a son with autism. Stacey Gordon told CBS on 60 Minutes: “Had my son’s friends been exposed to his behaviours through something they had seen on TV before they experienced them in the classroom, they might not have been frightened. They might not have been worried when he cried. They would have known that he plays in a different way and that that’s OK.”

For Ferraro, the ultimate goal is that Julia just becomes an ordinary regular cast member, not a talking point. “I would love her to be not Julia, the kid on Sesame Street who has autism. I would like her to be just Julia.” Then they will have succeeded in normalising it.

As more has been learned about how to diagnose autism at an early age, and the differences across the spectrum, numbers of diagnoses have risen across the globe. Here in the UK, the National Autistic Society estimates 700,000 people fall into the spectrum. According to the society, 34 per cent of children on the autism spectrum say that the worst thing about being at school is being picked on - a stat that clarifies the need for education at an early age. Furthermore, only 16 per cent of autistic adults in the UK are in full-time paid employment. If autism in all its forms were better understood by younger generation, it might open doors in the future to ensuring every individual has an equal chance of being accepted into the workforce.

"Some of the biggest leaps forward in understanding of autism have happened because of films, books and TV shows, like ‘The A Word' and ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’," Lever told WIRED. "We hope that Julia, the Sesame Street character, will have a similar effect and inspire other writers and film-makers to reflect the diversity of the autism spectrum in their work.”

You can watch the full 60 Minutes episode on Julia here.