Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Becoming You’ On Apple TV+, A Docuseries About How Children Develop Over Their First 2000 Days (2025)

The docuseriesBecoming You, narrated by Olivia Colman, takes a look at how kids around the world develop over their first 2000 days, from birth to about the age of five-and-a-half. So much of what they know gets locked in by this time, that the first 2000 days are fascinating to examine, to show how these kids go from tiny, unmovable babies to kids who have their own sense of self and their own likes, dislikes and ambitions.

BECOMING YOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Tokyo, Japan. Three-year old Ruru looks at the window of his apartment, checking the scene with his binoculars. His dad comes to him and tells him to go pick up some sushi.

The Gist:Director Tom Barbor-Might and showrunner Hamo Forsyth follow 100 kids of various ages as they navigate their world, and each episode has to do with various categories of development, like how kids learn to move, how they make friends, talk, think and feel. In the first episode, though, the filmmakers examine how kids gain their senses of self.

That’s why we see little Ruru going on “My First Errand” on the streets of Tokyo. It’s a ritual that is common in Japan, to help give the child a sense that he or she can operate independently in the great big outside world. We see a two-year-old in Tokyo just starting to recognize that the baby in the mirror is her and not someone else. A three-year-old in Nepal gets really into photography (and is pretty good!), and example of how little ones become intensely interested in things for a few years. A three-year-old boy in Brooklyn wears a dress to acting class, because gender is an amorphous thing at that age. But by the time everyone turns four, like we see with two friends in England, conformity creeps in and gender roles start being followed.

In San Antonio, a four-year-old boy cements his fandom of a minor-league baseball team. In Borneo, a five-year-old hunts for clams for dinner for everyone in the stilt-house village where she lives. And in Dallas, kindergarteners create a time capsule, talking about their likes and what they want to be.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Becoming You fits in with other child-development docuseries like Netflix’sThe Beginning Of Live andBabies.

Our Take: The beauty ofBecoming You is that it’s just so darn adorable. Lavishly-shot footage of kids trying to figure out life is worth watching, if only to encapsulate just how quickly things change for kids during their first five-plus years. It’s a summary of how they go from those adorable, pooping and peeing blobs that can’t even hold their heads up to semi-independent people with their own personalities and interests in what seems like the blink of an eye.

I’m currently living with someone coming up on her 2,190th day (she’s turning 6 next month), so I’ve seen these changes up close in the recent past. It’s remarkable to me how far she’s come, so seeing these 100 kids going through similar changes rings very familiar with me.

But the show’s global focus also shows how kids’ development is affected by cultural differences big and small. If a three-year-old was walking by himself in any U.S. city or town, for instance, his parents would get a visit from Child Protective Services. Five year-olds aren’t given responsibility to fish or hunt for their family dinner in much of this country. But, as you’d expect, it’s heartening to see that kids are mainly the same no matter where they are, and that they have more in common than they don’t.

Becoming You does play a bit simplistic at times; it’s not designed to be a scientific lecture about child development and how kids’ brains change over time. It’s designed to be visual, to show the changes with real-life examples. And it’s designed to be cute AF. So we can tolerate the fact that the docuseries will only give us occasional tidbits of info we don’t already know as long as we keep seeing all those kids figure life out.

Parting Shot: The kids we see in this episode (plus a few more) tell the camera what they want to be when they grow up.

Sleeper Star: We felt bad for little Delilah, whose BFF, Lachlan, ignored her in the preschool playground because he was playing with the other boys. We were relieved to hear Colman say, “Delilah will be fine.”

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could see.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Becoming You probably won’t teach you things you don’t already know. But its scope is wide enough, and its subjects adorable enough to make you want to watch, anyway.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

StreamBecoming You On Apple TV+