The YouTube star Ms Rachel, toddler whisperer extraordinaire, spots me before I clock her, and even from a distance and without her trademark pink T-shirt and denim dungarees, she is instantly recognisable by her wave, which is accompanied by an enthusiastic bounce. I half expect her to say, “Hi, friends”, as she does at the start of many of her videos. Instead she bounds over, wearing a classic off-duty mum uniform – Sesame Street sweatshirt, grey leggings, baseball cap that reads “Mama” – and removes her oversized sunglasses.
She’s very sorry, she says, rubbing her eyes, that she is so tired – but her manner remains unfailingly, characteristically peppy. It is only seven years since Rachel Accurso, who used to be a preschool music teacher, uploaded her first video to YouTube, a counting song for preschoolers called Bubble, Bubble Pop!. She and her husband, Aron Accurso, who worked as a music director on Broadway, made the video because their one-year-old son had a speech delay and there seemed to be a dearth of quality videos online that could help toddlers learn to speak.
Nowadays, the Ms Rachel YouTube channel has more than 21 million followers, and since she signed with Netflix in 2025, the series has been streamed more than 69m times, becoming the highest-ranked new kids’ TV show. You can buy Ms Rachel dolls, rattles, talking toy phones, books and pyjamas. The couple are releasing their first album this month.
Ms Rachel, who is 43 and has a 17-month-old daughter, Susannah, as well as her eight-year-old son, Thomas, has also amassed a huge following on Instagram (5.5 million) and TikTok (11 million), where the mums of her superfans congregate, and where she cuts a more controversial figure, having become a vocal opponent of the Israeli government over its war in Gaza, and a campaigner on other humanitarian issues, such as family immigration detention centres in the US and the war in Sudan. She champions LGBTQ rights, posts about the case for slavery reparations and free universal childcare, and is emerging as a hero of the American left. This month, when the rapper Macklemore pledged $1m to organisations supporting Palestine, Ms Rachel said she would match the donation and said every “wealthy white celebrity” should do the same.
Earlier this year she was on the inauguration committee for Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s charismatic leftwing mayor. She has publicly endorsed other insurgent progressives, such as Abdul El-Sayed, who recently won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan – making her a whole lot more political than any children’s presenter needs to be. We are meeting in a park close to her in-laws’ home in Colorado, where she filmed during the pandemic, which is when Ms Rachel videos began taking off in a very big way.
Her preschool fanbase are, of course, unaware of any of her politics, and they cannot get enough of her. Her videos use song and play to teach first words, early phonics and other essentials like potty training. One has been viewed over 2bn times, considerably more than the average Taylor Swift music video.
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