Sesame Street to reveal muppet’s mom suffered from addiction

“Sesame Street” will reveal one of its muppets’ mothers suffered from opioid addiction. 

As part of a set of new resources that include videos, storybooks and tips for parents, the green muppet with yellow hair named Karli will explain that she was in foster care because her mom “was away for a while because she had a grown-up problem,” NBC News reported.

Karli, introduced earlier this year as a muppet who was in foster care, will tell her story through the Sesame Street in Communities project, which offers free content online. The show creators said they wanted to focus on addiction because 5.7 million children under 11 years old live with a parent who struggles with a substance addiction, according to The Associated Press.

{mosads}”How they’re impacted by addiction is often something that we don’t hear about or, more importantly, don’t hear [in] a children’s voice or perspective,” NBC News reported Jeanette Betancourt, senior vice president for U.S. social impact at Sesame Workshop.

Karli told NBC News that “I love my mom so much” but that “she couldn’t take good care of me because she was having such a tough time.”

The muppet teams up with a 10-year-old girl named Salia Woodbury, whose parents have been in recovery from opioid addiction for eight years, for a segment on the topic.

“My mom was having a hard time with addiction and I felt like my family was the only one going through it,” Karli says in the segment according to the Post. “But now I’ve met so many other kids like us. It makes me feel like we’re not alone.”

Sesame Street has covered and explained many sensitive subjects for children over the years, including HIV, jailed parents, poverty and homelessness.