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! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi4AV2S4xA0 .
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... READ MORE
