Want to ditch screens? Here are the top podcasts for kids

The Age

a day ago

A few years back, I was Team Velociraptor by a large margin, curled up listening to a podcast with my T-Rex-loving grandson. Sucked in by the set-up. A race between two dinosaur species through weird terrains of all kinds. Over 14 or so minutes, University of Queensland palaeontologist Tim Richards and ABC sports editor Amanda Shalala call the contest, like it was happening before their eyes. Survivor for the ears, but 200 times more thrilling. Fart jokes, puns, actual palaeontological facts, bone length, permutations of teeth and a script which sounds like it was written by a football commentator. No wonder it gets fan mail and the reward of nearly seven million downloads.
This is ABC Kids' Dino Dome. At the end of June, a new season drops. Not that I don't love listening to T versus V for the umpteenth time or the explanation of why reptiles are not dinosaurs and pterodactyls can't fly. But I'm ready for new racers. From June 26, it's a special 'knock-out' format. Listeners will know the competing dinosaurs ahead of time as they face off in a round-robin. They won't tell me who is in the first round, but Richards says this season they will race Australia's most complete pterosaur. And what's the mystery?
'It's really hard to know when pterosaurs went to the bathroom because they have a silent p.'
Dinosaur jokes. Works for me. How did I end up being obsessed with a kids' podcast? Grandkids. Obviously.
There doesn't seem to be any curated guides to the best children's podcasts, so I'm sharing what I found, what I love, and what others suggested. All of them, the kind you can listen to with little ones, big ones or even by yourself. So what's on my list besides dinosaurs? Nature. History. Difficult life questions.
Unless you possess superhuman patience, it is not possible to keep reading books to your kids/grandkids/small humans in your care until they have had their fill. They have never had enough. Podcasts fill the gap. Kyla Slaven, a former UTS radio lecturer and then parent of a 10-year-old, had a wild idea about a decade ago: to create podcasts for kids. I thought she was completely mad, especially when she pitched Short and Curly (ABC), an ethics podcast. Yet, her foresight proved true. The very first episode in 2016, Can you trust a robot?, now seems eerily prescient. Podcasts, Slaven says, enable family listening in a way that live radio can't.
When I asked Helen Adam about the value of podcasts for children, her response went beyond simply filling a void in the market. Adam, an Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University and the president of the Primary English Teachers Association of Australia, has dedicated 42 years to researching how children learn to read.
She says podcasts serve as a 'bridge into reading and loving books'. Crucially, this bridge leads away from video clips and cartoons – which, despite their undeniable charm (love you Bingo, on behalf of all younger sisters), ultimately only lead back to more screen time.
'When you are watching, you are just a viewer. When you are reading or listening, you become those characters. It builds kids' background in patterns of language in how texts are put together, storylines, words, phrases. These are great benefits for language acquisition for kids,' says Adam.
'When you read, the neural pathways are similar to actually living that experience. And when you listen, it develops language comprehension.'
Turns out, podcasters could tell there was a need. Ann Jones, host of Noisy By Nature (ABC), says parents want engaging content without turning kids into zombies . Parents want lots of choice because kids are repeat listeners (as my velociraptor vs T-rex experience reveals).
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Children, it seems, form an immediate bond with podcasts. Jones now experiences people approaching her on the street, and parents send her videos of their children mimicking her. Her favourite episode Noi-SEA: Humming Continental Shelf stars a dugong sounding like a cow, what sounds like a vacuum cleaner and the best real underwater sounds you've ever heard.
Jones says kids start consuming media almost from birth, highlighting the crucial juncture when media literacy must begin. What's true? What's not? And what powers our imaginations? New research also shows that podcasts for children often feature an even wider vocabulary than those aimed at adults, thereby stretching the word stocks of kids too. Also, the heartstrings. Take this.
'Hey, how do you remember your family back home?' Trust me, your eyes will start to prickle with tears when you hear this question – about whether kids who were convicts stayed in touch with their families – in Hey History! (UTS, Latrobe, HTA NSW and Impact Studios)
Many adult podcasts boil down to a couple of old mates having a laughing competition. Not that there's anything wrong with that. However, many of the children's podcasts recommended to me by various adults, children, and teachers would never neatly fit into the 'entertainment' category.
Anna Clark, a history professor, mother to Hey History!'s narrator Axel, and granddaughter of Australia's eminent historian Manning Clark, has for two decades been driven to reform how history is taught.
Hey History!, which won gold at this year's NYF Radio Awards for Best Children's Program, is her latest tool. She is executive producer of the podcast alongside Professor Clare Wright. Drawing on decades of research in history education, she wanted to create a resource for primary teachers (most of whom have done little or no Australian history since their own Year 10).
When I read the word resource, I cringe. Not this time. And that's partly due to narrator Axel, 15, a persuasive actor. The podcast's producer asked Axel to audition and offered him the role, for which he gets paid. (I ask him to tell me the worst thing about working with his mother. I assure him her feelings won't get hurt. 'She can take it,' I say. 'I know she can't,' he deadpans.)
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Most of these podcasts are what Lulu Miller, queen of children's podcasts and host of Radiolab's Terrestrials, calls intergenerational. Anyone can listen and love what they are hearing. Here's how Miller describes the premise for Terrestrials: 'We are scouring the earth to bring very narrative stories which seem like fairytales, that seem like adventure stories about creatures...every episode is fact-checked, it's 100 per cent true.'
You have to listen to the episode on the silence of the bees. 'Is it a new disease? Is it because of pesticides? Maybe it's the cell phones!'
Spoiler alert: it's not the mobile phones. But around 2006, farmers across the US opened their beehives to find them empty. Terrestrials delves into why, featuring experts, didgeridoos, and genuine narrative tension.
Turns out most children's podcasts do a brilliant job of bringing it altogether: the tension, the narration, the music, and enough real experts to help us all understand and inspire further learning.
Want more suggestions? Museum Victoria's The Fact Detectives (now out of production but loads of episodes still). National Geographic's Greeking Out, Theo and Matt (a truly sweet father-reading-to-his-child dynamic), and Imagine This (ABC).