Today, McDaniels, 57, is exercising his education muscle with a vocabulary-building series from called “What’s the Word?” as well as a children’s book, Darryl’s Dream, a semi-autobiographical story that focuses on social-emotional topics like how to deal with stress and confusion. “Once you get to rehab and therapy,” he says, “you discover that all those things existed when you were little; it’s just that nobody addressed it.”

In an interview, McDaniels and Makeda Mays Green, vice president at Nickelodeon, share about their collaboration on “What’s the Word?” and advice on how to make literacy fun for early learners. Here are five literacy lessons from the conversation:

1. Music drives literacy. In McDaniels’s succinct formulation: “You put a rhythm to it, you learn it.” Over Zoom, he demonstrates for me why the ABCs is “one of the best raps in history” and Dr. Seuss is “the best rapper ever.” Mays Green cites Schoolhouse Rock as one of the new series’ inspirations. “We’re using music to teach kids the meaning of the words they’re singing,” she says. “We know from a number of studies that kids have the innate ability to grasp messaging when it comes through the vehicle of music.”

Partnering with a musical legend beloved by parents (and, let’s face it, grandparents) makes it more likely that an adult will enjoy the program alongside the young audience. “Darryl embodies a love of learning and the value of literacy,” she continues. “That means listening, speaking, reading and writing.”

2. Comic books are good reading tools. McDaniels originally learned his ABCs so he could keep up with the exploits of Spider-Man and Iron Man. “Something in there was so powerful,” he recalls. “It made me want to learn to read, so I could understand what was going on.” With his thick, square glasses, the protagonist of Darryl’s Dream was more of an awkward Clark Kent than a Superman, and that double-identity, too, captured the appeal of comics. (Among favorites more likely to be found in the children’s section of the library, he names Sounder, Curious George, Charlotte’s Web and, above all, Pippi Longstocking. He was bowled over when a recent episode of the revisionist superhero series The Boys acknowledged Pippi’s superpowers.)

Later in life, when he rapped about such personal struggles as discovering he was adopted, he made sense of it all through his first literary love: “I’m a superhero in the comic books / My make believe is your reality / I’m everything I pretend to be / Everything I need is inside of me / And anything else is the enemy.”

3. Hip-Hop brings down barriers. Run-DMC helped U.S. audiences discover a whole new musical vocabulary — not to mention the emerging hip-hop culture, fashion and attitude — but they also provided an opportunity for fans around the world to learn English. “I was just in Austin for the South by Southwest conference,” the artist says, “and a guy from Guatemala introduced himself by saying, ‘You know how I learned English? Listening to RUN-DMC on the radio!”

For many fans, the signature moment in the band’s career occurred in the “Walk This Way” video, when Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler used his microphone stand to break through a wall separating rap and rock. Mays Green of Noggin says children continue to respond to this penchant for literal and figurative barrier breaking—just as he rapped in “King of Rock”: “Now we crash through walls / cut through floors / Bust through ceilings and knock down doors.” For some reluctant readers, watching a rule breaker pick up a book can be inspiring.

4. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” McDaniels loves this quote from Albert Einstein, explicating, “He didn’t say knowledge wasn’t necessary. He knows that if you put imagination with knowledge, nothing is impossible.”

For McDaniels, imagination starts with coloring books, arts and crafts and storytelling, and it continues through envisioning your future. Kids should aim high, but the higher they aim, the more discipline it will take. School is where dreams and discipline come together. “Showing up on time, getting in line when the bell rings, if you can’t do that, I’m not going to hire you for my million-dollar company. School is preparation if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, entertainer, whatever.”

5. “Let the kids tell you who they are.” In recent years, McDaniels has appeared at countless school assemblies, and he sees a lot of reason for hope as well as concern. “The kids need the permission to discover their purpose,” he says. “That’s the whole key to empowerment. A lot of curricula and techniques don’t allow that.”

Maybe the reason adults don’t ask open-ended questions is that they’re afraid of the answers, but McDaniels urges, “You’ve got to give them a minute where you can ask them, ‘What is your journey? What do you want to be? What do you see yourself doing?’” If they know you’re really listening, they’ll have a lot to say.  â€œKids discover who they are by exploring and learning more about the world, other people and the many possibilities that exist for them,” says Mays Green. “And early literacy is key to that learning and self-discovery.”

McDaniels is thrilled about teaching early learners literacy skills with “What’s the Word?” because he still loves watching cartoons, and being a cartoon that kids relate to and learn from is even better. ”Reading prepares you for your destiny. Literacy sets you up for a dream coming true.”

A new initiative from Noggin and its nonprofit partner Sparkler Learning helps young children explore emotions through music. Called , the endeavor seeks to support social-emotional learning for preschoolers and kindergarteners. As part of the initiative, Noggin released an album called Big Heart Beats, for which it commissioned songwriters and performers to create songs that both evoke a feeling and equip children to name it, talk about it and validate it. As a dad still traumatized by Wheels on the Bus sing-alongs a decade or more ago, I was pleased to discover that the Big Heart World songs are also more than listenable for the adults in the room.

The songs are collaborations with Noggin’s production team — led by Sean Farrell, senior vice president of content and strategy —which provides briefs to the artists and then makes suggestions. For example, Farrell might recommend changing multisyllabic words to something in the vocabulary of 2- to 6-year-olds. Noggin creates animated music videos for some of the tunes.

I spoke to the artists behind two Big Heart World songs and learned about their lives, careers and creative processes.

“The Sad Song”

Michael Levine, Noggin’s senior vice president of learning and impact, calls it the happiest sad song he’s ever heard. What’s up with the upbeat dance rhythms?

Ryan and Courtney Lofty, the act responsible for “The Sad Song,” explain that it is less about experiencing sadness than understanding sadness. The discovery that you share this emotion with others can be cause for celebration: “It helps to say out loud, ‘I’m sad (S-A-D), talking it through, with somebody.”

Based in Las Vegas, the couple specializes in children’s music that doesn’t sound like nursery rhymes. “We make songs the whole family can enjoy,” Ryan says. “With modern production instead of, you know, xylophone.” They also create music for Baby Shark’s Big Show! on Nickelodeon and love hearing Kimiko Glenn, as the title character, singing their songs. Seeing one of their productions come to life through animation never stops being a thrill.

In composing “The Sad Song,” they imagined something they would sing to their 3-year-old godson, Dylan, but Courtney says, “This is for us, too,” adding, “When we were kids, we didn’t have social-emotional education. And we could have used it.”

“It means a lot to us that we’re helping kids during the pandemic,” Ryan adds, noting the widespread isolation and emotional hardship of the past few years.

“Share a Smile”

Mireya Ramos and Shae Fiol from Flor de Toloache Zoomed with me from Puerto Rico, where they were living with Ramos’s parents during a COVID-imposed pause on their tour. The only all-female mariachi ensemble in New York City was formed in 2008. The name comes from a flower used in Mexican love potions. Flor de Toloache in 2019 and has teamed up with John Legend and salsa legend RubĂ©n Blades. They’ve played themselves as a cartoon mariachi band on PBS Kids and appeared at the White House for Hispanic Heritage Month.

“Share a Smile” is about how to be a good citizen. “Share a smile / lend a hand / listen closely / take a stand.” Fiol says they wrote the song with her daughter Amel in mind, but “it’s also for our inner child.”

The mariachi-flavored music and the nonverbal vocalizing are just as important as the lyrics for capturing the spirit of togetherness. Appropriately, the best part our Zoom had no dialogue: I got to see Ramos and Fiol as they watched the new video of their song — featuring characters from the Nick Jr. programs Bubble Guppies and PAW Patrol — for the first time. The look on their faces revealed an emotion too powerful to put into words. But music could probably do the job.

At , based in the department of psychology at Harvard University, researchers are trying to find out how and why the human mind is designed in such a way that we all hear, understand and respond to music. Researchers do experiments with people all over the world from many different social, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds; the lab also hosts the project, a large body of studies and recordings of music throughout the world.

We’ve all heard the old adage, “Music is the universal language.” The Music Lab has plenty of data to back that up: nearly 5,000 descriptions of songs and song performances from 60 human societies. And babies have been a big help, at least with one piece of the puzzle.

In a study led by Music Lab researchers Constance M. Bainbridge, a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Mila Bertolo, a Harvard researcher, 144 infants aged 2 months to 14 months were monitored as they listened to lullabies and non-lullabies they had never heard before. The researchers fitted the babies with heart rate and skin monitors — like a baby Fitbit, they say — and tracked the babies’ eye movements as they listened to the songs. Each of the songs was played for 14 seconds.

The songs were all in unfamiliar languages from 16 cultures, half of them sung by men and half by women, all without instrumentation. Whether the baby was hearing an Iroquois lullaby sung by a woman or one from the Ona people of Patagonia sung by a man, the babies’ heart rates went down, their skin’s electrodermal activity decreased, and their pupils became smaller — all indicators of relaxation. This response didn’t occur when the babies heard the other songs, a finding that indicates that lullabies’ calming effects might be innate to human beings, not learned.

“The fact that we saw the effect very young and that it was constant between the ages of 2 months and 14 months is a pretty surprising finding for something we didn’t need to learn. It’s the fact of having a human brain that has us perceive certain sounds in certain ways,” she says.

When the songs were played for the babies’ parents, they too were able to predict which of the songs would calm their babies, distinguishing lullabies from love songs, healing songs or songs intended to inspire listeners to dance. (Listen to the songs .)

As is often the case with research, the lullaby project has brought up even more questions than it’s answered at this point, and it’s too early in the project to come to solid conclusions. Though they can’t say for sure, the researchers speculate on how the role of lullabies in human society evolved. Singing to a child requires focus and awareness, they say, and that could signal safety.

“You need to be focused and have your attention on that infant,” Bainbridge says. “If you’re singing to the child, that means you aren’t communicating to other adults or responding to potential dangers. So, it might be an honest signal of parental investment in the welfare of the child.”

For parents who might have performance anxiety about the idea of singing to their babies, the researchers offer an encouraging word: You don’t have to be a professional musician to sing your baby to the Land of Nod.

“It’s really the kind of music that everyone engages in,” says Bertolo, “so even if someone thinks they can’t carry a tune in a bucket, they’re probably comparing themselves to a performer. They’re probably capable of much more music than they realize, so I would think their musical ability is not a worry.”

The researchers have a paper in the works that looks at what elements in lullabies drive the relaxation response. Does it have to do with the melody, smaller intervals between notes, a particular rhythmic profile and more repetition? Lullabies are recognized globally as different from other kinds of songs and the researchers are hot on the trail of why.

And from that question, another arises: If a certain element — the melody, say — sets the lullaby apart and the scientists manipulate the songs to make them even more melodic in that specific way, will that make the infants even more relaxed.

It stands to reason that a smooth tempo is part of the equation.

“With other songs, you might hear a surge in volume at the onset, or emphasis on a particular word,” Bainbridge says. “With dance songs, you need to have something that each listener can reliably track so they can move to the beat. And love songs can be quite all over the place, with really dramatic jumps and volumes. But with lullabies, you don’t want to startle the infant, so generally there’s a nice, gliding melody and their rhythm is very smooth.”

The Natural History of Song’s ethnographic record indicates that lullabies are a vocal form of music, as opposed to being primarily instrumental.

“This is pure speculation at this point,” Bainbridge says, “but I would imagine that because it lacks human touch, instrumental music wouldn’t be such a signal that there’s caregiving or safety available. As adults we all experience that there are some songs that get us hyped up or songs that soothe us, so I imagine there’s at least a little of that effect. But I imagine the human touch figures in (to lullabies’ soothing quality).”

The researchers are looking at whether there is a health benefit to lullabies and whether training parents to sing more lullabies and introduce more music into the home might translate long term to having better health outcomes for both parent and child.

They’re also investigating whether lullabies foster a child’s social intuitions relating to caregivers. If the child sees an adult singing to a different infant, will they look to that caregiver to attend to them when they get upset, or would they perceive another adult as equally likely to come take care of them?

Again, this inquiry goes to the evolutionary function of music. If it is a universal language — and it sure seems to be—the message of lullabies the world over is some version of, “You can wind down now and close those baby eyes of yours. I got you, Boo.”