‘Hi friend!’ is the sound that I now hear in my dreams, after my ten month old son and I have discovered Ms Rachel. I’m not a fan of the phrase ‘if you know you know’ but there is no more appropriate way to refer to the magic of Ms Rachel, the New York preschool teacher who has taken YouTube and TikTok by storm over the last few months.
Ms Rachel - full name Rachel Griffin Accurso - now has just shy of 5 million subscribers on her Songs For Littles YouTube channel, and 4.5 million views on TikTok where she regularly shares her reactions to fan videos from parents exalting her powers, with many claiming Ms Rachel has been responsible for their first words.
The channel's description explains that parents can expect ‘toddler learning videos and baby learning videos that help children learn to talk, learn letters, numbers, colours, animal sounds and more.’ Speech is the primary focus of Accurso’s singing and learning videos, and was the inspiration for her to launch her channel in the first place after her son, Thomas, was diagnosed with a speech delay. ‘His first word was at 2 years and 8 months and it was 'mama' and I had waited for that for so long,’ Accurso said in an interview. ‘As a parent you want to do anything you can to help them and it's not our fault when our child has a speech delay. A lot of things I teach are things I wish I had known for my son.’ She adds, ‘I kept searching for this show for him and we couldn't find it, so I was like, maybe we can try to create it and maybe it would help more kids.’
There is something so captivating about Accurso’s videos that once parents - and babies - discover them, they become a go-to, to the point that many TikTok users joke that she is responsible for parenting their kids while they get some much needed peace to do tasks around the house. In a recent profile for the New York Times, Ms Rachel was described as 'Beyoncé for toddlers'. One mum, Gemma, tells Grazia why her one-year-old loves Ms Rachel so much: ‘I don’t like having lots of screen time for my daughter, but sometimes it’s a necessity so I can have some time to get things done. Ms Rachel somehow feels guilt-free because she’s gently teaching so much, whether it’s how to clap or how to say ‘up’. My little girl breaks into a huge smile whenever she appears on the screen. Having Ms Rachel on for 10 or 15 minutes a day is a sanity saver!’
When it comes to speech development, mum of two Rhiannon wishes she had discovered Ms Rachel sooner.
‘It’s such a relief to find something like this online – my son connected with it almost instantly,’ she says. ‘So many more children have speech issues now and the help available from authorities seems only to be dwindling. On top of that all the information online can be so confusing. Having now paid privately for speech therapy, I can see what Ms Rachel is doing is so smart and so helpful – I was so happy to watch her videos with my son and I just hope other parents who are worried or struggling might stumble on them too. It’s nice to see such a crucial need being met, and in a fun way that you don’t mind seeing over and over again. Because believe me, your kids will want to watch them over and over again…’
Ms Rachel’s success becomes all the more incredible when you realise she and her husband - Broadway composer Aron, who has worked on productions such as Aladdin - and their team of performers and composers, create every video from their one bedroom apartment. And while Rachel already has a masters in music education from NYU, she is currently pursuing a second masters degree in Early Childhood Education.
If you’re immediately struck by Ms Rachel’s trademark, slow, happy, earnest voice - she has an explanation for it, and if you find it annoying, she points out that it’s ‘not for you’. She says that ‘parentese’ is show by research to help language development. ‘If being annoying to you helps little ones, I’ll take that as a compliment.’