It seems like yesterday I was curled up on the couch with my preschoolers watching The Wiggles and Dora the Explorer.  

I loved seeing my kids get up, move around and actively engage with the direct questions they were being asked. 

And there were so many sing-a-longs, too. From I’m the Map, to Backpack, Backpack, to Fruit Salad, Yummy Yummy — these were the songs that became the soundtrack of our lives.

These memories are all too important to me, as I’m sure similar ones are to many parents out there. 

Finding a show that speaks to your family’s values, and encourages development and learning, is such a win. I know this all too well.

Let me introduce myself — I'm Marie McCann, the Senior Director of Children’s and Youth Programming at the CBC. I’m always working on finding or making your kids a show that they will not only love, but that you will trust. 

And I’ve been doing this for a long time.

Back when my kids were little, in their Wiggles years, I would drop them off at a little church basement daycare and then slip into my office at TVOntario.

It was there where I was fortunate to be part of the incredibly talented team that created Gisele’s Big Backyard, a series of shorts built around the eternally silly and effervescent Gisele Corinthios (also of Gisele’s Mashup Adventures). And it’s also one of many times I got to work with Jason Hopley, who played Gisele’s squirrel pal Stix (you may know Jason as the one and only Gary the Unicorn).

Working in kids programming while I was raising kids of my own was a rare opportunity. I had a built-in test audience at home who, if I was lucky, would laugh at my jokes and learn a thing or two. As I poured my heart and mind into creative and developmentally appropriate segments, I would go home every day feeling like my work was being informed by my parenting. 

Between me and my kids, we felt like an unstoppable team. 

Fast forward about seven years and The Wiggles had morphed into One Direction. My kids leapt from playing with Barbie to watching The Next Step.  

At first, I found the crop tops and dueling ponytails a bit alarming, but as my kids watched and danced and gossiped about the drama, I saw them rehearsing their next big steps. They were aging out of childhood and into that transformative stage called puberty.

As they quickly began to change, so did their interests. 

Influencers on YouTube had replaced the familiar faces on cable and public TV. I noticed that one of my children would always leave the room when news came on — the standard evening broadcast wasn’t for them. 

And as you may expect, this was a light bulb moment. I wanted to help find a way in for kids and teens who thought news might not be for them, too. 

By 2016, I was working with CBC Kids and a group of us came together from CBC News and the CBC Kids team to address what we saw as a rise in misinformation on the social platforms kids were using.  

In 2018, we launched CBC Kids News, Canada’s first daily news service for and by kids. And in 2022, we rebooted CBC’s financial literacy series Street Cents for teens on TikTok. These daily videos, also available on YouTube, help teens make sense of money in their own lives.

What I had come to learn about my kids over this time of their lives was how nimble they were. They could pivot to a new way of doing something rather quickly. 

By 2017, they had fully adopted Netflix. We would get together as a family and watch shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Immersing ourselves in streaming, it occurred to me rather quickly that outside of the more general audience comedies, there were also scads of shows with attractive teen characters, which would obviously appeal to them, but the storylines could be especially dark and mature for kids under 13. 

That was another area that needed focus, and once again I saw a problem that needed to be solved. How could CBC Kids make their world of content better?

When CBC Gem launched, we started looking for and creating shows at CBC Kids we hoped could be authentic and attractive to tweens. We began thinking about content by how it could support their social and emotional development in the very critical stage of transformation they were in.

The goal: a collection for and through the lens of kids from nine to 13. 

Since then, we have created or partnered on tween shows that bridge themes like Canadian history and mystery (Detention Adventure and Macy Murdoch), explore trans identity (First Day) and neurodivergence (A Kind of Spark), take on the compelling genre of fantasy (Spellbound and Theodosia) and the world of dance (The Next Step).

And this month we launched Gangnam Project, which is based on creator Sarah Haaz’s own lived experience as a Korean-Canadian teenager. You’ll be transported to a K-pop idol school in South Korea, full of music and dance, and I know you’re going to fall in love with it like I have.  

At every step of my career, I’ve kept my kids in mind. What were they going through? What were their milestones? 

And while both of my kids are in their early 20s now, it still made me well up when my youngest binged the whole season of Gangnam Project with me and said, "I would have loved that when I was a kid.”