If you ever actually paid attention, there are some interesting things being said in the very catchy tune that is the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants. If nautical nonsense, be something you wish/ Then drop on the deck and flop like a fish! Turns out, it’s not all nonsense. In a report published by Business Name Generator, the beloved Nickelodeon show had the richest vocabulary of all the popular kids’ shows they studied.
All parents stress over how much time kids spend in front of screens. As our dependence on them grows, it becomes harder to set limits with our kids. That’s why it’s good to know which shows may actually be serving our kids more than others. You may be surprised by the results.
To try and figure out which children’s TV shows had the widest vocabulary, Business Name Generator looked at some of the most popular series meant for an under-14 audience since the ’90s. They analyzed the words in each show to calculate how many “unique” words appeared per 1000 used. In this case, “unique” meant those “that only appeared once in the entire sample of words for that show.”
SpongeBob SquarePants topped the list, with 21% of the words being unique. Four of the top 10 shows were from the ’90s and 50% of them were animated.
SpongeBob had 213 unique words per 1000 words used. Kinda wish they would have analyzed more shows from this decade, because not sure whose kid is watching 7th Heaven. Regardless, it’s interesting to see how rich the vocabulary of a show is because we know the importance of exposing kids to a wide variety of words from a very young age. Research has shown kids who are read to before bedtime have a million-word advantage over kids who are not by the time they get to kindergarten—the idea being “kids who hear more vocabulary words are going to be better prepared to see those words in print when they enter school.”
And SpongeBob himself is a dynamic character to get behind—no wonder kids love him. His favorite color is beige, his favorite flavor is vanilla, and he’s afraid of the dark. Some research conducted in 2015 said 25% of his viewers are adults with no children. That’s not weird!
One important thing to note is that for very young children, no amount of screen time is considered a positive. The AAP still calls for “no screen time at all for children until 18 to 24 months, except for video chatting, and says kids ages 2 to 5 should get an hour or less of screen time per day.”
