Danny LaBrecque on Offering Authentic Connection

Danny LaBrecque, creator and host of Danny Joe’s Tree House, talks to TV Kids about the creation of the series and the importance of offering authentic connection through the screen.

Like many of us, Danny LaBrecque found comfort and connection in his childhood via the TV screen through the likes of Fred Rogers and Bob Keeshan. Growing up with a mother dealing with cancer, “there was something about connecting with that one person through the screen that was so sincerely authentic and almost magically very much in the moment,” he tells TV Kids.

Later in life, when he became a teacher, he made use of puppets in his classroom. “Not at the level of a puppeteer but the way that preschool teachers use any object they can to get kids to find the words,” LaBrecque says. “I was really amazed by how much kids would tell me when I would bring up my childhood teddy bear and say, ‘How do you think Teddy’s feeling today?’ At first, I thought we were going to talk about separation anxiety, standard development stuff, but heavy things would come up. I realized that kids are still dealing with the big issues that impact us as adults. Kids are people, too.”

LaBrecque saw the types of shows his students were watching—shows that he calls “cookies for breakfast” that are fun with quirky characters but lack connection. “Authentic, real human beings connecting through a screen and just being you, meeting you where you’re at—very difficult to find those. So, I wanted to try to do that.” And thus, he created Danny Joe’s Tree House, with himself as host.

The storylines and lessons of the show are based on the things he hears from the kids he works with either directly from them or through messages he receives from parents and caregivers. And he doesn’t shy away from addressing deeper topics. “My mom did pass eventually [when] I was an adult,” LaBrecque says. “I was working in a care center in Baltimore called The Ark Preschool, the only accredited preschool that served families dealing with homelessness at the time. I had to miss one of my weeks because my mom had passed, and I told the teachers about that. When I came in a couple weeks later, to my surprise, the teachers had shared this with the students. They made me a very nice card. But this is the thing that really hit me: I was thinking about the heavy emotion of losing a parent as an adult, but very young kids in this program, 3- to 5-year-olds, came up and would say things like, ‘They got my mom, too,’” he explains. “Having it delivered in such a mature, reassuring way from a child, ‘Yeah, death happens. I know.’—Our kids are dealing with a lot.”

“Beyond just ‘sometimes we’re happy, sometimes we’re mad, sometimes we’re sad,’ sometimes we’re dealing with first and secondary experiences with gun violence,” he says. And it’s “not just where I’m at in the United States, but [there’s] violence around the world. It’s always going to be there, and it’s always going to impact children.” His goal is to help children process these types of events and experiences through the language of play and by being present and letting them know he is there for them and wants nothing in return.

In the past, he invited Erricka Bridgeford onto the show for an episode on gun violence. In Baltimore, she runs a program called Baltimore Ceasefire, “where she goes out after a shooting and she is present with the community and helps them to heal,” LaBrecque says. “And she looks at every perspective: those who got hurt, those who did the hurting. Beyond good and bad, how do we come out of this? How do we grow? There was very little talking in it. It was just being present.”

And kids are wiser than adults often give them credit for, especially when dealing with the complexity of human nature. LaBrecque brings up Kingsley, an authoritarian king puppet on the show. “Early on, Kingsley was just going to be a bad guy, the point of conflict. But then, again, the kids through the screen and in the classrooms were the ones saying, ‘Where’s Kingsley’s mother?,’ ‘Does he talk to a therapist?’ ‘A feelings doctor,’ another kid said. And we found out that Kingsley’s super complex, like everybody else.”

Beyond the content of the show itself, LaBrecque is determined to create a safe space for children by the ways in which his show is shared. Though it was once available on YouTube and Facebook, he has since removed it from those platforms. “The only social media I’m still on is LinkedIn because it has nothing to do with kids; I know who I’m talking to,” he says. When Danny Joe’s Tree House was available on sites such as those, he would get messages of frustration from parents about algorithms leading children to content that was not child-friendly. Although there are certain protections being put in place, namely COPPA, “until it’s completely refined, I didn’t feel comfortable risking even just one of the families that I serve.”

Aside from that, he doesn’t see social media as being healthy for anyone, and “I didn’t want to be one of the reasons to bring kids into these houses that I knew weren’t completely safe,” he says. Social media and other technological advances are inevitable, however, so an upcoming episode of the show delves into early media literacy to teach children how to navigate online experiences and the slew of advertising that is thrown at them from many platforms.

Luckily for LaBrecque, he did find a safe place for his show: Sensical. “I love Sensical to death,” he says. “Their attention to their creators—it really is a relationship. I feel very heard there.” And it is kid-safe, with child development experts approving every video to ensure children aren’t led to any content that isn’t age appropriate.

The third season of Danny Joe’s Tree House is slated to premiere on Sensical this month with more puppets, lessons and connection, but in the future beyond that, “I’d like to try to create a little bit of a path for many of my colleagues, who I don’t see as competitors,” LaBrecque says. “They approach these things in their own very unique ways with their own core missions; not as a character but as their true authentic selves.” Children deserve this kind of content, he says. “We all deserve it.”

It is important to note that though Danny Joe’s Tree House is a children’s show, it’s not just children who can benefit from it. LaBrecque notes an experience he had a few years ago at a puppet slam in Baltimore. “It was very artsy, adult puppetry,” he says. “I was invited to do it, and I was very nervous about it because I did not want the adults making fun of the preschool puppeteer guy.” To his surprise, the audience loved him and his simple puppets. “After the show, they came up and said, ‘Listen, I like affirmation. You make me feel centered.’ Because it is a therapeutic thing.”

“It feels good to have sincere affirmation and to have a host that’s not saying, ‘Hey, push the like button,’ or ‘Buy my product,’” he adds. “You don’t have to push a button to like me, I want you to know I like you, and I really want you to like yourself.”