Sesame Street's new muppet called Julia, who has autism
Julia, with blazing red hair and bright green eyes and a toy rabbit, will join Big Bird, Elmo and Kermit the Frog next month on the hit kids telly show aired on HBO and PBS in the States.
The puppet will display typical traits associated with autism – including communication difficulties.
For instance, in her debut episode Meet Julia, when Big Bird walks over wanting to be friends, she doesn’t speak to him, thinking he doesn’t like her.
Abby tells her pals: ‘She does things just a little differently, in a Julia sort of way.’ And when a siren goes off, Julia covers her ears and panics.
And in a scene currently being recorded at the moment, Julia has been spotted in a scene with Oscar, Abby and Grover playing a game spotting shapes and the muppets point out that’s she really good at it, when Abby tells Grover: ‘You’re lucky. You have Julia on your team, and she is really good at finding shapes!’
For more than a year, Julia has been in digital and printed storybooks, but bosses of the show want to beef up her role by including her in the main show, with her own episode, Meet Julia, to introduce her to kids worldwide.
With one in every 68 children across the pond diagnosed with autism, the show wants to help stop the stigma associated with the developmental disability.
Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president of U.S. Social Impact, said: ‘We wanted to promote a better understanding and reduce the stigma often found around these children. We’re modeling the way both children and adults can look at autism from a strength-based perspective: finding things that all children share.’
But trying to explain Julia’s disorder to young children was a challenge.
Sesame Street writer Christine Ferraro told the CBS News show 60 Minutes : ‘The big discussion right at the start was, “How do we do this? How do we talk about autism?'”
‘It’s tricky because autism is not one thing, because it is different for every single person who has autism.’
But creators wanted to stress that just because Julia has autism, she doesn’t depict every child with the condition.
Writer: Jessica Walford for Metro.co.uk
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