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My daughter has always been very visual. Preschool shows taught her quite a bit - and she still uses tv to explore facial expressions and social situations... especially boys and girls. And kissing. Dad just loves that...

I think Winnie the Pooh was and is good. It has both old and new incarnations. The ones from the 60's were half hour specials rather than serialized cartoons. What is so good about Winnie the Pooh (a strength written into it by its' true author A.A. Milne) is that all the characters have strong, identifiable emotional and psychological characteristics. I think this helped my daughter learn to label emotions and also to see how different the psyches of other people can be. The world of Winnie the Pooh seems more neurodiverse than other fictional worlds. There is also some of that in SpongeBob, which she also likes.

I think the worst and most harmful for an autistic child is Teletubbies. Blessedly she grew bored with it after a month or so. None of the characters have identifiable emotions and they are all exactly alike. Theory of Mind skills are impossible to practice watching them because they all seem to share a hive mind. They also speak in noises rather than words so they are no help at all with giving usable words or phrases for echolalia.

Now that she is older she still watches both Winnie the Pooh and Spongebob and uses them to practice Theory of Mind skills, something that you can't really do with some of the other shows that are otherwise good, like Dora th Explorer. With her older and more sophisticated understanding she can see that certain situations make Piglet very anxious while making Tigger very excited and make Eeyore feel weary. She is starting to talk a lot about how differently all the characters feel about the same situation, which she didn't truly get when younger. We have a lot of good discussions about how people percieve the same situation differently based on their brains. That wasn't possible when she was younger and it isn't possible with a lot of other kid shows.

Thanks for that excellent insiteful post janissy, you make a lot of sense. I will try some Winnie the Poo with my boy.

There's a series of books by Roger Hargreaves called Mr. Men and Little Miss that date back to the 70's. There's been 3 different television series based off the books over the years (I think I've only seen the first and second). Each character embodies one trait, Mr. Happy, Mr. Rude, Mr. Messy etc. (there's over 100 of them, I think) and each character has their own book. Some of the stories are pretty silly but there's just something about them I like and I think my son has learned a little from them.