Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children
The TV legend possessed an extraordinary understanding of how kids make sense of language.
MAXWELL KING
JUN 8, 2018
For the millions of adults who grew up watching him on public television, Fred Rogers represents the most important human values: respect, compassion, kindness, integrity, humility. On Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the show that he created 50 years ago and starred in, he was the epitome of simple, natural ease.
But as I write in my forthcoming book, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, Rogers’s placidity belied the intense care he took in shaping each episode of his program. He insisted that every word, whether spoken by a person or a puppet, be scrutinized closely, because he knew that children—the preschool-age boys and girls who made up the core of his audience—tend to hear things literally.
As Arthur Greenwald, a former producer of the show, put it to me, “There were no accidents on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” He took great pains not to mislead or confuse children, and his team of writers joked that his on-air manner of speaking amounted to a distinct language they called “Freddish.”
Fundamentally, Freddish anticipated the ways its listeners might misinterpret what was being said. For instance, Greenwald mentioned a scene in a hospital in which a nurse inflating a blood-pressure cuff originally said “I’m going to blow this up.” Greenwald recalls: “Fred made us redub the line, saying, ‘I’m going to puff this up with some air,’ because ‘blow it up’ might sound like there’s an explosion, and he didn’t want the kids to cover their ears and miss what would happen next.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talking-to-kids/562352/
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I have great respect for Fred Rogers, preschool, and kindergarten teachers. Teaching kindergarten requires the same sort of saintliness as teaching middle school. I've brief experience with both.
Alas, I was the sort of kid who *wanted* to see stuff blow up. Take my blood pressure now! It's just an arm. I can grow a new one, right?
I also remember what pill bugs taste like.
I played with black widows too.
For science, of course.
I remember matches, electrical outlets, and other science experiments as far back as age two.
In grammar school I wanted to catch a gopher. I'd been scolded several times for sitting on the hill where the gophers were, lunch and recess watching the gopher holes, urged to play with my classmates, but I persisted. I finally grabbed the damned gopher as it poked its head out of his hole and he bit me bloody several times as I attempted to keep my grip on him before he escaped. I didn't tell anyone about my injuries because I'd been scolded, and I was convinced I was going to die of rabies for at least a year. Perversely, I was okay with that.
My kids wouldn't sit still for Mr. Rogers or most television. We shared some Sesame Street times, Magic School Bus times, and Bill Nye the Science Guy times, but those were brief.
My youngest kid, supposedly grown up with an excellent university degree, is still playing with fire. Just like his mom and dad were were at that age. Don't tell.
My octogenarian mom still worries about me and my siblings, a few of her grandchildren, and all of her great grandchildren, since it's the most fearless and most reckless among us who tend to breed earliest. My dad is a bit more philosophical. In his family he's seen it all.
Alas, all my grandparents were touched. My mom and dad side-stepped the family curses by calling themselves artists and having respectable day jobs.