Ms Rachel, the controversial queen of toddler TV: ‘My goal isn’t to be the most liked. It’s to help kids and speak the truth’

The YouTube star Ms Rachel, toddler whisperer extraordinaire, spots me before I clock her, and even from a distance and without her trademark pink T-shirt and denim dungarees, she is instantly recognisable by her wave, which is accompanied by an enthusiastic bounce. I half expect her to say, “Hi, friends”, as she does at the start of many of her videos. Instead she bounds over, wearing a classic off-duty mum uniform – Sesame Street sweatshirt, grey leggings, baseball cap that reads “Mama” – and removes her oversized sunglasses. She’s very sorry, she says, rubbing her eyes, that she is so tired – but her manner remains unfailingly, characteristically peppy.

It is only seven years since Rachel Accurso, who used to be a preschool music teacher, uploaded her first video to YouTube, a counting song for preschoolers called Bubble, Bubble Pop!. She and her husband, Aron Accurso, who worked as a music director on Broadway, made the video because their one-year-old son had a speech delay and there seemed to be a dearth of quality videos online that could help toddlers learn to speak.

Nowadays, the Ms Rachel YouTube channel has more than 21 million followers, and since she signed with Netflix in 2025, the series has been streamed more than 69m times, becoming the highest-ranked new kids’ TV show. You can buy Ms Rachel dolls, rattles, talking toy phones, books and pyjamas. The couple are releasing their first album this month.

Ms Rachel, who is 43 and has a 17-month-old daughter, Susannah, as well as her eight-year-old son, Thomas, has also amassed a huge following on Instagram (5.5 million) and TikTok (11 million), where the mums of her superfans congregate, and where she cuts a more controversial figure, having become a vocal opponent of the Israeli government over its war in Gaza, and a campaigner on other humanitarian issues, such as family immigration detention centres in the US and the war in Sudan. She champions LGBTQ rights, posts about the case for slavery reparations and free universal childcare, and is emerging as a hero of the American left. This month, when the rapper Macklemore pledged $1m to organisations supporting Palestine, Ms Rachel said she would match the donation and said every “wealthy white celebrity” should do the same. Earlier this year she was on the inauguration committee for Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s charismatic leftwing mayor. She has publicly endorsed other insurgent progressives, such as Abdul El-Sayed, who recently won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan – making her a whole lot more political than any children’s presenter needs to be.

We are meeting in a park close to her in-laws’ home in Colorado, where she filmed during the pandemic, which is when Ms Rachel videos began taking off in a very big way. Her preschool fanbase are, of course, unaware of any of her politics, and they cannot get enough of her. Her videos use song and play to teach first words, early phonics and other essentials like potty training. One has been viewed over 2bn times, considerably more than the average Taylor Swift music video. Even the first clip she ever made has now been viewed 21m times. “That’s funny, because it’s not that good!” she jokes: she and Aron filmed it in their New York apartment with her phone balanced on a stack of books.

There’s often something mysterious about internet fame: in a crowded field of self-taught content creators, what distinguishes the star? Accurso sometimes cannot believe the twist her family’s life has taken. “If 10 years ago someone said, ‘You’re in Rolling Stone’, we’d be like, ‘For what?’ And if they said, ‘For The Wheels on the Bus and the Caterpillar song’, we’d be like, ‘What?! How did that happen?!’” she says.

But, though unpredictable, the couple’s success is hardly random. Accurso points out that they identified a niche, an untapped demand for educational content for toddlers, and that their videos were co-created with their early audience, who told them what they liked and what they wanted more of. “It almost feels like this live thing you’re creating with parents,” she says.

Then there’s the fact that if you set out to identify the perfect couple to make hit toddler TV, you would struggle to improve on Rachel and Aron Accurso. Consider their professional and academic backgrounds: she has two master’s degrees – in music education and early childhood education – and early learning professionals attest to the science behind her approach. In an era of screen-time shaming, the Accursos create shows that parents don’t feel guilty about letting their young kids watch.

And then there is Accurso’s personality, her wide-eyed warmth and wholesomeness. She seems to be the rare person who truly loves hanging out with kids – who is genuinely delighted to play not only with her own, or her friends’ children, but with any five-year-old.

She and her husband – who also just seems so freaking nice – have complementary personalities, she says. She’s always bursting with ideas; he knows how to winnow them down and organise a timeline. They call each other “instant oatmeal” and “slow-cook oatmeal” because, “I just want things fast and he takes his time,” she says. And this is “crazy”, she tells me, but once, long after they had established these nicknames, they were both making breakfast and she looked over and saw that he was stirring slow-cook porridge while she was making instant! They are ridiculously cute.

So why get involved in politics? Accurso says she was advised to keep quiet on political issues, and she fielded arguments that “didn’t feel right”, such as, “If you don’t say anything about anything controversial, you’ll help more kids, because more people will watch.” She has faced pushback from conservative parents over her support for LGBTQ rights, and for using they/them pronouns when introducing the musician Jules Hoffman, who is non-binary, but this has been eclipsed by the response to her criticism of the Israeli government.

Accurso says she witnessed footage from Gaza and spoke to families there, and cannot understand why anyone who has done the same would not feel moved to do all they can to stop the violence. “It’s good to criticise governments for violating children’s rights. It’s something that everyone should be doing. Because we’re the grownups of this world and we’re meant to keep children safe. And the fact that we are not is horrific,” she says.

From a pure business perspective, the advice about staying silent may have been right. When she began speaking out about the humanitarian toll on Gaza, the backlash, which included accusations of antisemitism, took her by surprise. “I was confused and devastated that people said because you care about children who are starving, and whose food is being blocked, you don’t care about these [Jewish] kids,” she says. “I was like, oh my gosh, I have a deep love for, a deep care for, all children.” She has posted messages of sympathy for Jewish victims, and has collaborated with groups such as Parents Circle, which works with Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost loved ones, and yet the public response to her work is as messy and heated as you’d expect: the pro-Israel group StopAntisemitism nominated her for antisemite of the year in 2025, although many other Jewish organisations have rallied in her defence. She says she has grown accustomed to the maelstrom. “I had this moment when I was praying to God, like how do I handle people hating me? And I feel like I got the message that our goal in life isn’t to be the most liked or the most loved,” she tells me. “It’s that you’re meant to help kids, and stand with kids, and speak the truth about things.”

Because of her outspokenness on Gaza, some Jewish parents have switched allegiance to Ms Sara, a kids’ YouTuber who even looks a lot like Ms Rachel – with the same long brunette hair and knotted headband – and who teaches Jewish culture and songs. “I think she’s wonderful!” Accurso says, when I mention her. “I’m never like, ‘Don’t watch this person – watch me’, at all.”

One of her more hardline public stances is her refusal to work with people who have not publicly spoken out in defence of civilians in Gaza. “I’m going to work with people who aren’t in a privileged position, because that’s not fair to them if they could lose the ability to put food on the table. But people who are privileged who don’t say anything? Yeah, I’m not interested in working with them. Because I feel like maybe if we all said something, the genocide would stop,” she explains.

Not everyone will agree with this analysis; where some hear compassion, others will diagnose political naivety. “Why are we starving kids when there’s enough food in the world? Why are kids in Sudan starving? Why are kids in the Congo facing sexual violence? They’re kids. I don’t understand. And why do we dehumanise other people when I just feel like every person is different in beautiful ways but also so similar? How could we not want to help everyone?” she asks at one point. Sometimes she says she feels as if she’s living in a “fake, surreal world” because she does not understand how we can tolerate so much unfairness and unchecked suffering. She thinks all elected politicians should be forced to meet children like Rahaf, a three-year-old Gazan amputee she invited on the Ms Rachel show, so they understand the stakes. So is she naive, or is politics too unfeeling?

“I just have a really good moral compass,” she tells me at one point. Which may be why, for all the controversy, she says she is often approached and thanked by strangers on the street, and she enjoys a lot of breathless, all-caps online support. “Ms Rachel for president,” her supporters sometimes write underneath her posts. When the Democratic candidate Graham Platner dropped out of the Maine Senate race after being accused of sexual assault, Accurso – who is from Maine – was spoken of as the dream candidate for Democrats there. “That’s hilarious,” she says. She has no interest in entering politics. But, she adds, sounding unusually tentative because “maybe everyone will be upset”, she hopes to one day become a Christian minister. One thing you need to know about Ms Rachel is that she’s the kind of person who prays every day for the people who hate her.

Accurso says she was “born spiritual”. She was raised in small-town Maine by a single mum, who dropped out of university when Accurso’s elder sister was born, but later retrained as a social worker and was often juggling multiple jobs. Her mother remains her lodestar, and she named her daughter – born via surrogate in 2025 – after her. It was “rough at times”, growing up with little money, and Accurso felt rejected by her father and used to wonder why he didn’t seem to want her. That said, her mother surrounded her with “so much unconditional love”. She watched her mum shovel snow and build a treehouse and fix the plumbing by herself, and it expanded her own ambitions. It also shaped her politics. “All my experiences have led me to knowing we should take care of each other,” she says.

Accurso was an anxious child, who by seven or eight was showing signs of OCD, flicking her light switch on and off to ward off trouble. She felt things deeply. Her mother has kept a note of how, at three, when she heard her neighbour was killing ants she exclaimed, “Don’t kill ants! Let them be free and feel the world!” When her mother could not take her to church because she had a new weekend job at Pizza Hut, Accurso, though only nine, went by herself. She didn’t join the children’s Sunday school but sat through the sermon for adults, praying and trying to “figure things out”.

As a young adult she considered joining the seminary, but while working at a school for children with disabilities she felt “led” in a new direction. She formed a close bond with a child with cerebral palsy who was nonverbal, and her supervisor told her she had a “rare talent” for connecting with kids. Galvanised, she went into teaching, and later enrolled for a master’s at New York University, where she wrote a thesis on how to use songwriting to empower children going through hardship. She joined the Unitarian church when she moved to the city – it had a preschool attached and she figured she might get work there. The first time she went, someone offered to introduce her to “the best musician in the world”, and Aron Accurso ambled over.

Aron, who loved her smile, offered to walk her out, asked for her number, and made her wait a torturous three days before inviting her on a date, where she ate shrimp for the first time and thought, as they talked about music, that he might be her future husband. On their third date, she asked him if he liked Mr Rogers, the gentle, cardigan-wearing children’s TV presenter, and – what do you know? – he loves him, too. The couple married in 2016. “I feel like our souls are totally meant to be together,” she says.

Rachel and Aron had always enjoyed being “silly” together, and at first their Ms Rachel videos felt like “play”, but during the pandemic, when Accurso was teaching on Zoom, and Aron was stuck at home because theatres were closed, and parents were wondering how on earth to entertain their children through long lockdown days, things started taking off. Accurso soon received offers from executives hoping to buy the company. She would sit through meetings hosted by a “bunch of men” with ideas for how to commercialise the project and, although she was suspicious of their lack of interest in the educational side of her work, it was Aron who kept reminding her that she didn’t need their expertise. “Forever, I thought I was going to be replaced as the host,” she says. “Once we had millions and millions of views I thought, oh, maybe a real TV place will get a real actor and see that this was a good concept.” For years she felt as if she was just some “35-year-old mom”, a stand-in for the real, professional Ms Rachel. “We didn’t know that toddler TV could be big business,” she says.

The Accursos say their wealth is nowhere near the figures circulating online – I saw $50m – and most of their profits are put back into the company. Still, the couple must have more money than they ever imagined – enough that, on top of their recent $1m donation to Palestinian charities, the Accursos donated $1m to the World Food Programme in 2025. “My spirit doesn’t want to ever …” she says, struggling to express herself. “Well, I don’t have any fancy things, I could say that.” Oh, come off it, I say, but a bit more politely: what’s the fanciest thing you’ve bought yourself? “I like to buy toys … I think toys are fun, little fidget toys and stuff,” she replies. She has a cupboard filled with gifts in her house, so that any child who visits can pick out something for themself. That doesn’t count, I say. Have you ever bought yourself an expensive handbag? She only has one handbag, she says, because she has ADHD and has learned that if she has more than one, she loses important stuff. What about a fancy car? Nope. House? “I think space in New York is hard to come by and space is nice, but I don’t want a fancy house.”

“Oh no!” Accurso suddenly exclaims, when we have been speaking for almost 90 minutes, and Aron is due to join us in the park. She is supposed to be talking about her album and she has been going off on all these tangents! Aron arrives a few minutes later, blond and very blue-eyed in a blue button-down shirt and smart linen trousers – they have taken a very different approach to dressing for this interview, she jokes with him as he approaches.

The forthcoming album, I’m So Happy, is Aron’s passion project. The couple had received business advice that they should scrape their most popular songs from YouTube and get the thing out as soon as possible – but Aron wanted to devote “extra care” to the album. He ended up collaborating with 19 singers and 42 instrumentalists, and worked with Michael Starobin, who has orchestrated several Disney films. “I really believe that kids respond to it, and kids deserve that kind of rich, beautiful music,” Aron says. Among the 23 tracks are classic nursery rhymes, like The Wheels on the Bus, and songs written by the Accursos themselves, including Caterpillar, a surprisingly affecting tune Aron wrote while trying to get their son to sleep. Whenever they play the song for their children, everyone starts weeping, and I must confess that when I listened ahead of the interview I grew teary, too. “Every day you’re growing bigger, you once were a little guy, but caterpillar, caterpillar, soon you’re going to fly,” it goes. (OK, I know. But, trust me, try listening to it.)

The musical flourishes are a boon for parents, who will inevitably hear these songs on infinite loop – more than any human should ever have to listen to anything, I say, experiencing a sudden intrusive memory of My First Album by Peppa Pig. “When your child is having fun, you’re having fun,” Accurso replies, because that is the kind of pure-hearted person she is. But then she does mention this one annoying song that Thomas really latched on to when he was two … before requesting this detail be removed from public record because she doesn’t want to be mean.

An album also has the advantage of allowing children to enjoy Ms Rachel without looking at a screen, I suggest. That’s true, Accurso says, but she does think we’re too hard on parents (and on ourselves) about screen time. “There’s a lot of judgment and shaming of parents, and I think if you understood what most parents are going through, that wouldn’t be there,” she says. She is not exactly a neutral party to the screen-time debate – toddler screen time is how she pays the bills – but she points out, quite fairly, that sometimes we all need our kids to veg out in front of the TV so that we can get stuff done. It can also be a useful tool for children with additional needs. It was a “gamechanger” for her son, who was too busy charging around to listen to Accurso as she followed after him, instructing him to “say Mama”; but when she was on a screen teaching him how to articulate his first words, he focused.

So, what are her screen-time rules, I ask. “Rules?!” she exclaims, sounding confused. “Just kidding!” Although her daughter loves singing with them both, sometimes the only thing that will calm her down on planes is watching Ms Rachel on TV. That morning, Accurso let her watch Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood, a cartoon inspired by Mr Rogers, so that Susie would stop trying to do dangerous stuff while Accurso was getting Thomas ready for summer camp. Susie is “such a sweet baby, but she has a hitting problem”, Accurso says, and this morning’s episode was about feeling mad. Susie has made progress, of sorts. Now, after she has hit someone, she says, “I’m mad.”

Accurso seems more relaxed – and goofier – with Aron present. At one point she slumps over the table, and he asks if she’s OK. “Just looking at a spider! Keep going!” she says. “You focus, and I’ll be the ADHD person.” Ms Rachel’s political profile must have taken a toll on the whole family. They have had security problems that they don’t want to go into. “We’re learning how to deal with that,” is all Aron says. When I ask if he ever wished for Accurso to stop talking about controversial issues, he replies that her compassion and empathy are “genuine” and are “something I fell in love with and admire about Rachel”. There was no question of stopping her, because if she didn’t stand up for her values, she wouldn’t be Rachel, he adds. “Aww, thank you, Aron,” she coos, reaching for his hand, “that is so sweet.”

Accurso still suffers from anxiety and OCD, struggling with intrusive thoughts, but her health is well managed with medication and therapy. It helps that she is learning that the internet is “not real life”, and that she doesn’t need to listen to the online vitriol. This morning, she received an email warning her of some new online nastiness about her, and she decided to simply not look.

I noticed when I scrolled through her Instagram and trawled through the comments that I started to feel anxious myself, imagining the extraordinary pressure she is under. The pressure comes not only from the hatred but from the adulation, the weight of expectations, the requests for help. I read a message from someone who said they had designed a headstone in her likeness for their one-year-old who had died unexpectedly, and could they show her a picture?

Then there is the immense responsibility that comes from having such a large platform. In January 2026, screenshots circulated showing that she had liked the comment “Free America from the Jews”, under a post she had shared that read “Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo, Free Iran”. Rachel issued a tearful apology, explaining that she had clicked “like” accidentally when she was trying to delete the remark. She shared a screenshot of the private conversation she had with a follower who drew attention to her like, which supported her version of events: “Ya I believe I deleted that earlier right when I saw it! I hate antisemitism,” she wrote.

“After that I got a turtle puppet,” she says, momentarily confusing me – does she mean some kind of automatic moderation software? Before I can ask an embarrassingly stupid question, she clarifies that she literally means a turtle toy. She and Susie were playing with it, “and I was like, I need to slow down like this turtle because I can’t afford to make a mistake like that again”.

She tries, as much as any supercelebrity can, to keep her focus on her family. She and Aron had always assumed they would have kids right away, but they struggled with fertility for years. Thomas, Ms Rachel’s first muse, has overcome his early speech struggles. He likes to deliver lectures to his parents that he closes with a professional, “Any questions?” Susie is currently Christmas-obsessed – Accurso recently found herself Googling short-sleeved Santa costumes, until it struck her that that isn’t a thing – and is “so cute and aggressive”. Having a toddler in the house again is, of course, providing inspiration for the show. They need to do something new about boo-boos, Accurso says, and another bathtime song and, yes, definitely, something about how it’s not OK to hit.