Peppa Pig is so wildly popular that kids around the world have started talking with English accents, a phenomenon dubbed the “Peppa Effect.”
So just imagine the positive normalising influence if the show – which centres on Peppa’s family and other animal families in a quaint town— added a same-sex parent couple.
A petition with more than 17,500 signatures (at time of publish) is asking the show to do just that. “Children watching ‘Peppa Pig’ are at an impressionable age, and excluding same-sex families will teach them that only families with either a single parent or two parents of different sexes are normal,” the Care 2 petition reads.
“This means that children of same-sex parents may feel alienated by Peppa Pig, and that other children may be more likely to bully them, simply through ignorance.”
But in its more than 250 episodes, it has never featured a set of same-sex parents, the petition points out. And that’s not the first time the show has been criticised.
In March, the show was slammed as being sexist by the London Fire Brigade, who said it discourages girls from becoming fire fighters by using the term “fireman.”
The show has also been accused of reinforcing gender stereotypes. In several instances, male characters in the show have turned up their snouts at the colour pink. There was that time Daddy Pig’s white football shirt accidentally got dyed pink in the wash, and he assumed it was one of Mummy Pig’s dresses.
Pink “isn’t a good colour for a football shirt,” he says. He then asks Peppa’s little brother George, who is two years old and mostly doesn’t talk, what he thinks of pink.
“Yuck,” says the little boy.
That didn’t go over well with some parents.
“I don’t want (my son) to think that only dresses come in pink and boys should think that pink is yuk,” one mom wrote on the forum, Mumsnet.
Earlier in May, the PBS kids show, “Arthur,” kicked off a new season by revealing beloved Mr. Ratburn is gay, and throwing him a wedding.
The episode – titled “Mr. Ratburn & the Special Someone” – was widely welcomed on Twitter, then banned in Alabama.
A petition demanding that “Peppa Pig” NOT add same-sex parents was taken down from the Care 2 site.