There’s a voice in Rachel Accurso’s head. Right now, it’s also coming out of her tote bag — a recorded version of her alter ego’s cheerful tone made tinny by canvas.
“This is so funny,” she says, wrestling with a rainbow-colored plastic toy with her face on it, which is doing the singing in question. “I was walking down the street, and it was like, ‘Hi, friends!’ I don’t know how to shut it off!”
If she donned a pink headband, most people would recognize Accurso as Ms. Rachel, a children’s entertainer who started as an amateur YouTube host and has since crafted an educational universe. She has more than 20 million subscribers, a Netflix deal, a collaboration with Sesame Street, a line of toys available at Target and Walmart, children’s-book tie-ins, and an upcoming debut album, I’m So Happy, out Sept. 25. But there are two people at play here. Yes, there’s Ms. Rachel, a trusted face on the internet using songs to teach tykes how to say “mama,” use the potty, and hop like bunnies. But there’s also Accurso, a 43-year-old Christian mother of two whose conviction to speak out against violence, poverty, and disenfranchisement of children, particularly those in Gaza, has turned her life as a public figure into a melee of controversy.
This duality isn’t immediately obvious in the woman who greets me at her door in New York City with a bulging plastic bag of breakfast food and a wide, open smile. When the construction in the apartment next door makes itself known — clanking and paint smells seeping under the door — our morning at home swiftly turns into a picnic. “Let’s go down to the park,” she says, soft voice carrying only a trace of the singsong intonation that keeps children rapt. “It will be beautiful.”
Originally called Songs for Littles, Accurso started the show in 2019 with her husband, Aron Accurso, a composer and musician who’s worked on Broadway shows like Billy Elliot, Nice Work If You Can Get It, and Aladdin. Ms. Rachel videos, which can run anywhere from 30 minutes to more than two hours, cover a wide range of deceptively simple topics, like playing hide and seek, naming farm animals, or learning how to brush your teeth. But Accurso leans heavily on her master’s degree in early-childhood education, which gives the show a research-backed foundation. The nursery rhyme “The Mama Song,” for example, uses exaggerated mouth movements to encourage babies to mimic the motion. “Icky Sticky Bubble Gum” turns a silly story about gum into a lesson about the parts of the body. The song “Hop Little Bunnies” promotes movement and following instructions like “stop,” “jump,” and “skip.”
Accurso’s show doesn’t contain political material — unless lessons on friendship can be considered dangerous ideals. Nevertheless, Accurso’s activism on her public-facing Ms. Rachel social media accounts has made her and her family a target of harassment, accusations, and even death threats. It’s why, for safety reasons, I cannot share what neighborhood Accurso cheerfully walks me through, stopping to speak to neighbors and pet a fluffy white dog named Daisy dealing with a bout of arthritis. I cannot even describe the park where we set up camp to eat breakfast on the ground. Think being a mom is hard? Try balancing playdates and school drop-offs with security measures and constant vigilance.
On her public Ms. Rachel accounts, Accurso posts anywhere from five to 10 times a day on platforms like Instagram and Threads, calling out politicians, posting fundraisers, and constantly reiterating that children in Gaza deserve the world’s attention. Accurso’s driving belief is that with enough time, enough photos, enough heartfelt pleas, she can change people’s hearts and minds. But that fight comes with a limit — one Accurso is in the process of figuring out.
“‘You’re gonna lose this partnership. You’re gonna lose views.’ That doesn’t faze me because the kids gave me the platform. I’m going to stand with them no matter what,” Accurso says. “People on the ground in Gaza are risking their lives all the time to help kids. I can do it from Manhattan.”
AN IMPROMPTU OUTDOOR BREAKFAST with Accurso involves plenty of food, and what feels like even more apologies. First, Accurso apologizes for not having a picnic blanket. Then, it’s napkins, though she offers pieces of paper, a handful of Ms. Rachel-themed bibs, and at one point, her own tote bag. Then she apologizes for not thinking about dietary restrictions. She’s picked up what feels like every breakfast option, including yogurt, avocado toast and salad, and a fluffy omelet covered in chives. All that’s missing: utensils.
“Oh, my gosh, we are screwed,” Accurso says, laughing. “What are we gonna do?” There’s a shuffle for things we could use to build makeshift forks, but it’s eventually abandoned. Accurso manhandles the omelet, layering the salad on top before folding it in half. “It’s an egg taco!” she says gleefully. When the hand sanitizer I offer her disappears at the bottom of my bag, she waves my empty hands away with a shrug. “I [don’t] care,” she says, ripping a thick slice of sourdough topped with avocado mash clean down the middle. “I [have] a 16-month-old who eats dirt.”
Kids programming has always been an integral part of Accurso’s life. In fact, it probably still would be even if she wasn’t Ms. Rachel. No fewer than six times, she calls Fred Rogers — Mister Rogers — her “hero.” She adores Sesame Street and children’s books like Madeline. Growing up in Maine with a single mother, Accurso’s great love was the theater. She and her older sister — close to three years apart — used to call themselves “Sisteristic” when they put on living-room performances, and were constantly checking ads for community theaters. Accurso was once in a local production of Annie with Anna Kendrick; Accurso was Annie and Kendrick was a precocious voice in the orphan ensemble. (“When she did, ‘I love you, Miss Hannigan,’ she totally stole the show,” Accurso says. “I told her on DM[s] the other day, and then she found the program!”)
Accurso moved to New York in 2009. Soon after, she met Aron at a Unitarian church on the Upper East Side. “It was coffee hour at church. I was about to leave, and I said, ‘Oh, there’s a cute girl.’” Aron says. “When I started talking to her, I realized, ‘What an interesting person.’ Immediately I said, ‘I’ll walk you out.’” (Their first real date was the short-lived Broadway musical In Transit.) The duo are opposites, personality-wise. Aron tends to be quiet and straightforward. Accurso’s mind and mouth run a mile a minute. When an interested squirrel moves to investigate our breakfast, she goes silent midsentence. “I feel like we’re not supposed to feed animals,” she whispers, vocalizing the notes to Snow White’s “I’m Wishing,” hand outstretched. “And it’s so hard because I want to.” But the Accursos share a passion for making music.
“When I was teaching public school, I asked him to make a track because there wasn’t a karaoke [version] for this certain song. I thought he was just gonna sit down and [play],” Accurso says, miming plunking a few solitary keys on a piano. “He was there for hours and hours, adding all these instruments to exactly match the track. I think it’s cool that he [brings] the Broadway level of care and detail to kids’ music.”
“With Gaza, I couldn’t not speak out.”
The Accursos had their first child, Thomas, in 2018. After his first birthday, Thomas was diagnosed with a severe speech delay that required specialized therapy. It wasn’t cheap — about $175 for every 45-minute weekly session — but the techniques were life-changing. After she realized Thomas remembered more when he was able to watch lessons back on video, Accurso asked her husband to give her a birthday present. “I was like, ‘I want your mouth on a video camera to say cheese or baby,’” she says, curling her lips and baring her teeth to enunciate the syllables. “I’m self-conscious about my teeth. And he’s so nice, he’ll do what I ask. It was [Aron] jumping in right away [that crafted] that first video.”
Ms. Rachel’s popularity wouldn’t be possible without the rapidly developing relationship newer generations have with technology. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, every year, the age at which kids are exposed to screens goes down, and the number of hours they spend in front of screens goes up. And the choices available to them extend far beyond PBS or Disney. The landscape of online children’s content is cluttered with everything from multicolored fruit dancing to EDM to baby influencers, who unpack and play with mountains of toys on camera (à la Ryan’s World) for other kids’ enjoyment. When the Accurso family published their first video in 2019, they offered parents an educational and low-fi alternative. In one of their first videos, “Bubble, Bubble Pop!,” Accurso sings in front of a static underwater background for only two minutes, voice brassy without a professional microphone, before signing off with a cheerful “See you later, alligators!”
“The first things we filmed, we stacked books [to make a] tripod,” Accurso says wistfully. “I didn’t care if it was crooked.” There were also some technical glitches. “I would record a whole show and the mic wasn’t plugged in, and I’d cry.”
But kids were obsessed, as were adults. Parents would leave testimonials praising Ms. Rachel’s videos, saying they helped their children learn new skills, or calmed crying toddlers. There’s even an ongoing TikTok trend where parents play Ms. Rachel’s voice and wake babies out of dead sleep. As the Covid-19 pandemic set in, and millions of Americans became trapped in their homes with no access to mommy-and-me events, toddler classes, or respite, Accurso’s channel hit 1 million subscribers.
IF ACCURSO HAS A SUPERPOWER, it’s invisibility. Groups of screaming preschoolers pass by us in the park, fists clutched tight onto their walking ropes, chubby hands waving hello or pointing to squirrels scampering in their path. “Hi, friends, how are you today?” Accurso calls out as a group stops next to us. Not a single one seems aware that the only thing keeping them from recognizing their biggest idol is a pair of mint-green Lucite glasses and the absence of that signature headband.
“None of them seem to know I’m Ms. Rachel, which is totally great,” Accurso says softly, waving to the group. “Only grown-ups really do. [They] recognize me if they hear my voice. I often wear Mister Rogers socks or a Sesame Street shirt because I love children’s media.” That’s enough to tip people off. “Sometimes I’m not gonna wear the shirt, because I’m doing something with my son and I really want to focus on him. But I love meeting people out and about.”
Accurso describes herself as having an overdeveloped sense of empathy. She says she feels physical pain when someone else is hurting. It’s why she was struck in late 2023 when she saw videos of Palestinian children watching episodes of Ms. Rachel, often with the chaos of a humanitarian refugee camp directly behind them. As videos of the war in Gaza continued to flood in, the images stayed with her. When she saw a video of a starving baby in Gaza wearing a rainbow onesie similar to one her then-infant daughter, Susie, wore, it made her so upset she had to give the item of clothing away.
“When I see a mom who has a baby who is starving and they can’t get any milk, I see that and [think], ‘What if that was me and Susie?’” she says. “With Gaza, I couldn’t not speak out.”
Accurso’s online presence has always been intertwined with politics. In 2020, she shared children’s books about the importance of talking to kids about race, like the Ibram X. Kendi picture book Antiracist Baby. She also posted about the importance of voting in presidential elections. In 2024, she posted a video celebrating Pride Month and LGBTQ+ families (“This month and every month I celebrate you!”) — prompting a boycott from political commentator Ben Shapiro. She lambasted former New York Mayor Eric Adams over proposed cuts to early-childhood education programs in the 2024 city budget. She’s been vocal about the harm poverty and food insecurity can have on developing children, and is quick to condemn racism and homophobia. She remains a staunch critic of the Trump administration’s family detainment practices and xenophobic rhetoric against immigrant children. And she has a demonstrated history of fundraising for kids in war-ravaged areas — including mass displacements in Sudan and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. So she was surprised when her posts about the rising Palestinian death toll were met with aggressive criticism.
“Kids deserve detailed, rich music.”
When she collaborated with Palestinian war photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who has called Israel a terror state, she was accused of platforming an antisemitic voice in the movement. When she ramped up her posts about starving Palestinian children, critics said she was ignoring Israeli children targeted in the Oct. 7 attacks. In 2025, watchdog group StopAntisemitism put Accurso in the running for “Anti-Semite of the Year,” claiming Accurso inflated death statistics coming out of Gaza, shared “Hamas propaganda,” and ignored the deaths of Jewish children in Israel. The group also sent a formal letter asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Accurso was being funded by Hamas for her post. Accurso denies these claims, stating she has only shared statistics shared by verified sources, like the United Nations. Even then, some disputed their veracity. (“I have to realize that people who believe the U.N. is fake — that’s not people I can engage with,” she says.)
In January, Accurso started a firestorm when she accidentally liked an Instagram comment on her post that said “Free America From the Jews.” Accurso apologized — saying she hit the button by accident and removed it once followers brought it to her attention. “I thought I deleted a comment and I accidentally hit ‘like,’” she said in a tearful video. “I’m a human who makes mistakes. Everyone who knows me knows I would never like that.”
Looking back on the last few years, Accurso says, “I thought everyone hated me at one point. I remember calling friends and family members, Jewish and not Jewish, and just being like, ‘Why do people hate that I don’t want kids to be killed and starved?’”
Raffi — the famed children’s performer known for “Baby Beluga” and “Five Little Ducks” — says that Accurso’s work and activism center around spreading joy and working to protect children everywhere. “In her love of the world’s children, she’s a person after my own heart. Her embrace of Palestinian kids is what Fred Rogers would have done,” he says. “Rachel’s courage and compassion is exemplary. I’m happy we’re friends.”
But while close confidants have been supportive, the in-person backlash is also rampant. Last year, Accurso released a special performance of the song “Hop Little Bunnies” with Rahaf, a then-three-year-old from Gaza who lost both her legs in an Israeli airstrike. In the clip, filmed in New York, the two sing together. Rahaf swings her prosthetics to the song, and at one point, wraps her small arms around Accurso’s neck — following the song’s instructions and pretending to be asleep. But when she attempted to rent out a playroom for Rahaf’s visit, Accurso was turned away from multiple businesses, which cited threats and backlash.
“I finally found a place that would let us come. She had the best time,” Accurso says. “I just was like, ‘Let me just be in the moment with her and follow her lead.’ We played and laughed so much. It was beautiful.”
But even this perpetual optimist can’t hide the fact that constant scrutiny has complicated the life she imagined for her children. “I wouldn’t change anything. Well, I would love for people to not send death threats,” she says. “For a while, we had security, and they were like, ‘Don’t do anything predictable.’ And it was just like, ‘Oh, I have to think about what I’m doing and fear for my family.’ That was tough.”
Aron has always been happy for Accurso to be the public face of their show. “It’s a beautiful face,” he says, squeezing her hand. But he had to come up with emotional strategies for dealing with the threats. “I’m very proud of all the work that Rachel’s doing,” he says. “She wants the best for all the children of the world. She genuinely cares. I know that, and she knows that. And everything else is noise.”
Accurso knows her content can upset people. But she doesn’t see any of her advocacy — for Gaza, for Sudan, for immigrant families in the U.S. — as separate from her job as Ms. Rachel. For Accurso, being a voice for children means accepting the moral responsibility to consider their welfare from all angles. She has always said that she started her show to help people. But teaching phonics or manners or even how to say “mama” has an eventual victory. If Accurso wants to teach the world how to have empathy, she’s got to realize it’s a goal with no end in sight.
“When I first started talking about Gaza, some people didn’t connect. I realized I had to humanize the kids. That was what needed to happen for people to get involved,” she says. “There’s so much attacking in our world, and yelling at each other, it pains me when people don’t have that experience, and so they didn’t see [Palestinian children] that way. But I really believe in people’s ability to learn and change.”
THE MS. RACHEL PEOPLE INTERACT with online is almost always smiling. The real Accurso? Well, she’s tired.
I don’t see the effects until a few weeks after our breakfast, when I meet up with Accurso and her husband at the Ms. Rachel studio, housed in a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. The two used to live here with their children, but now use it to film the show. The center of the living room is almost completely bare, with two chairs on one side and an upright piano pushed against the other wall. Around it are Broadway posters like The Little Mermaid and Rogers’ autograph in a frame (a gift to Accurso from Aron). To the far left is a Silver Play Button award from YouTube, a plaque gifted to creators after they reach their first 100,000 subscribers.
When Accurso enters the room and sits next to her husband, her face, although smiling, is drawn, like someone has turned down her wattage. The night before, she posted a video on Instagram about an independent U.N. Commission of Inquiry, which found Israel deliberately targeted children in the Gaza Strip, even after the October 2025 ceasefire. “Where have you been, people we look up to? You didn’t want to lose your reputation or your power or your money?” Accurso says in the video, holding back tears. “How can you go to sleep at night knowing you didn’t say anything?”
Today, it seems the lack of sleep is weighing on Accurso. “I’m so excited,” she says softly, sinking into a deep chair and covering her face with her hands. “I’m gonna take nine days off. I haven’t taken a vacation in a long time.” She doesn’t want to share publicly where she’ll be going with her family, but the last “vacation” was the birth of Susie, whom the couple welcomed via surrogacy in 2025. “I didn’t go [anywhere] when she was little.”
It’s a reminder that while Accurso believes her advocacy is her responsibility as Ms. Rachel, it happens in a schedule already packed with rehearsing songs, filming videos, and being a parent. Right now, the big focus is the release of I’m So Happy, Aron and Accurso’s first album. It would have been easy enough to take some songs from the YouTube channel, add a new harmony here and there, and slap on a title. But that’s not how the spirit of Ms. Rachel works.
I’m So Happy is 23 tracks of both popular, public-domain children’s songs like “Old Macdonald” and “The Wheels on the Bus” and Ms. Rachel originals — all rerecorded with professional musicians. “When we did the YouTube versions, I would call up some friends and have them lay down other instruments from their home, and then I would try to mix it myself,” Aron says. “For the album, we wanted to take it to that next level of polish and sparkle. Each song has its own musical world.”
For over a year, Aron led the project, enlisting more than 40 musicians for live recordings in studios in New York and Nashville. Aron himself conducted strings for their heart-wrenching song “I Love a Rainbow.” “I’m really excited for families to experience these songs they already know from our show, and see how we expanded them with bigger versions that have new sections and fuller arrangements,” Aron says. “Kids deserve detailed, rich music. Although they can’t verbalize it, I think that [children] notice the care and detail that goes into the music.”
The whole family helped develop the album. “He played it for Susie all the time, and Susie would dance around and sing to it,” Accurso says, laughing. “Aron would be taking notes and thinking about the tracks while Susie pretended to be a dinosaur.”
Accurso suddenly pops up with a request — she wants Aron to play the piano for us. His good-natured protests don’t move her, and before I know what’s happening, the two are seated side by side on the piano bench, the notes to “I Love a Rainbow” already lifting into the air. Accurso closes her eyes next to Aron, the melody to the song already escaping her lips. She’s happy to be singing again.
There’s a childhood memory Accurso returns to often. When she was in second grade, she read Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline, a classic children’s novel focused on a rambunctious girl living in a Parisian boarding house. In the book, Madeline’s adventures are cut short when her appendix bursts and she’s rushed to the hospital. But rather than waiting patiently for Madeline’s return, her classmates require immediate comfort from their minders, believing that they too are deathly ill.
When Accurso read the book, she was immediately struck with pain in her stomach. Her mother hustled her to hospital, only for the doctors to realize Accurso’s active imagination had left her in the same predicament as Madeline’s friends. She was sent home and told that the stinging was in her head, but she couldn’t understand what they meant. The pain felt real. It felt urgent. It demanded action. She was feeling Madeline’s pain. Wasn’t everyone?
“But it hurts,” Accurso remembers saying. “I hurt, too.”
Production Credits
Hair by SAREEN BHOJWANI. Makeup by STEPHANIE POWERS. Photographic assistance: GRANT FLANAGAN and TESSA DILLMAN. Digital technician: FAISAL MOHAMMED.
David Manheim and Hunter Biden Courtesy of David Manheim