When Ms. Rachel Talks, Parents Listen
The YouTube star popular with preschoolers has been speaking up about the suffering of children in Gaza. The message is resonating with her grown-up fans.
Six years ago, Rachel Accurso was a new mom who started making videos for toddlers and posting them on YouTube.
Donning a pink T-shirt, denim overalls, and knotted headband, Accurso, a former New York City public school teacher, transformed into “Ms. Rachel,” a kind, patient figure who sang infectious ditties about stick bubble gum and fire trucks.
Her channel, “Song For Littles,” exploded during COVID, when parents were desperate to keep their kids engaged without rotting their brains. She is now one of the most popular creators of kids’ programming on YouTube, with more than 16 million subscribers. In January, Netflix began streaming a four-episode compilation of her videos, and it became one of the most-watched shows on the platform, even though the content was already available on YouTube.
Ms. Rachel has attained God-like status with the preschoolers of the world who are utterly transfixed by her sing-song voice and cheerful demeanor. Their parents, meanwhile, view her as a beneficent being with quasi-magical powers, like Mary Poppins for the streaming era.
Despite her wholesome persona, Ms. Rachel has become a controversial figure and a target of right-wing culture warriors, who’ve denounced her for performing with a nonbinary musician and — horror of horrors — wishing her followers on social media a happy Pride.
Lately she has also become one of the most outspoken — and effective — celebrity advocates for the children of Gaza. In the last two weeks, she’s appeared in the pages of the Washington Post, on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN show, and on Kylie Kelce’s popular podcast to talk about the entirely man-made humanitarian crisis in the region. On social media, she posts frequently about the children being deprived of food and other basic necessities because of the Israeli blockade.
She is the rare celebrity whose messages about the conflict seem to be resonating with the wider public, because she does not present herself as an expert in geopolitics but as someone who clearly cares about children’s wellbeing.
Unlike other stars who are largely preaching to a progressive fanbase, Ms. Rachel is revered by many average parents who may not be immersed in the online left. They aren’t necessarily well-versed in the long, thorny history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they can understand a message as simple and self-evidently true as “blocking food and water to children is idefensible.” In many ways, Ms. Rachel embodies a kind of conservative ideal: she is a white, married, Christian mother of two who met her husband in church. But the fact that someone like Ms. Rachel is speaking up on behalf of Palestinian children shows just how far the default has shifted.
Ms. Rachel’s advocacy began in earnest last spring, when she decided to raise money for Save the Children’s Emergency Fund by recording hundreds of personalized messages on Cameo. The money supported children in conflict zones including Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Ukraine.
Critics accused her of not caring about Jewish and Israeli children, but Ms. Rachel was undeterred. Earlier this year, she shared a video of her singing “Hop Little Bunnies” while Rahaf Saed, a three-year-old double amputee from Gaza who lost her legs in an airstrike, cheerfully bounced around on prosthetic limbs. Rahaf will appear in a special episode about friendship later this year.
“I have this platform. Kids gave me this platform, and I want to use this platform for kids,” Ms. Rachel recently told the Washington Post in a thoughtful piece her activism.
Ms. Rachel has also met with people whose family members were taken hostage by Hamas, and explicitly condemned anti-semitic violence via social media. Yet in April, a group called StopAntisemitism called for the Department of Justice to investigate whether the entertainer was being paid “to disseminate Hamas-aligned propaganda.” The claim is about plausible as Big Bird getting kickbacks from the IRA, but apparently wasn’t too ridiculous for the New York Times to ask about . (“This accusation is not only absurd, it’s patently false,” Ms. Rachel told the outlet.)
It’s worth noting that Ms. Rachel doesn’t discuss the definition of genocide, the viability of a two-state solution or concepts more advanced than the difference between a square and a triangle in her videos for children. She saves most of her overt activism for TikTok and Instagram, spaces that are not designed for preschoolers. And, unlike some conservatives, she’s not turning the cameras on kids and making them spout ideological talking points they likely don’t understand.
As she told Amanpour on CNN a few days ago, “Our audience is zero to four [years old]. I talk about big feelings and how to handle big feelings, but I don't go into things like war.”
Her show merely reflects the reality of a world in which innocent Palestinian children do in fact exist, but that alone is objectionable to some people. (As it always has been: in 1970, Mississippi officials refused to air Sesame Street because the cast included Black people.)
Ms. Rachel’s empathetic approach has earned numerous comparisons to Fred Rogers, the beloved PBS star who used his trailblazing program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to espouse values like non-violence and racial inclusivity that were radical in the era of Vietnam and Civil Rights. He was also a staunch advocate for government-supported children’s television, winning over Senate skeptics with his testimony in 1969.
Ms. Rachel has specifically cited the famous 1969 episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighbhorhood in which he shared a wading pool with Officer Clemmons, who was Black, at time when many public pools were still effectively segregated, as an inspiration for her collaboration with Rahaf.
“I read about a family that that was the end of that conversation for them, if pools should be segregated. They were like, ‘Mr. Rogers did it,’” she told Amanpour. “I wanted to show that Rahaf is my friend and I love her, and that I think she's precious, and that I think she deserves everything that any other child deserves.”
Rogers rose to prominence at a time when there was already plenty of kids’ TV, but very little that was educational. (Think: hours of cartoons every Saturday morning.) In 2025, there is an astonishing glut of kids’ content on YouTube, but much of it is creepy and insipid, informed by an algorithm rather than evidence-based research into childhood development.
Ms. Rachel, who has two advanced degrees in education, brings a PBS sensibility to the semi-lawless frontier that is YouTube. Like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and Sesame Street — and in contrast to other kiddie behemoths like Cocomelon — her programming earns high marks for its educational value. She speaks slowly, using clear, repetitive language that makes it possible for small children to absorb information through a screen.
In a sea of trash, Ms. Rachel is an island of pure, nourishing content, which explains why parents, who are inundated with messages about the dangers of screen time, are nearly as devoted to her as their children.
Sure, they’ve heard her rendition of “The Wheels on the Bus” so many times it haunts their dreams, but they also know their offspring are in good hands when Ms. Rachel is around. As a result, they’d do anything for her, including scouring the internet to track down sold-out dolls and audio players.
Ms. Rachel's growing legion of grown-up stans includes Oscar-winner Robert De Niro (who watches her show with his “discerning” toddler) and pop star-turned-beauty tycoon Rihanna (who recently slid into Ms. Rachel’s DMs.)
My kids are slightly older than Ms. Rachel’s target audience, but I understand the intense loyalty she inspires. When my older child was a toddler, we relied on “Baby Beluga,” the Raffi song about a “little white whale on the go,” which had an instantly calming effect during even the worst, Chernobyl-esque meltdowns. I will forever be grateful to Raffi (who, by the way, has expressed support for Ms. Rachel) because of the small measure of peace he brought to my family.
On r/DanielTigerConspiracy, a subreddit where exhausted parents vent about the media their kids consume, Ms. Rachel is the rare figure who inspires fervent expressions of devotion rather than snark.
“She makes my daughter sit still long enough for us to cut her nails, I would literally go into battle for this woman to repay that kindness,” reads a typical comment.
For many parents, that also means listening to her on Gaza.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian
Bless Ms Rachel
Love, Ms Rachel ❤️