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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.”
The
show’s final cuts reflected many similarly exacting interventions.
Once, Rogers provided new lyrics for the “Tomorrow” song that ended each
show to ensure that children watching on Friday wouldn’t expect a show
on Saturday, when the show didn’t air. And Rogers’s secretary, Elaine
Lynch, remembered how, when one script referred to putting a pet “to
sleep,” he excised it for fear that children would be worried about the
idea of falling asleep themselves.
Rogers
was extraordinarily good at imagining where children’s minds might go.
For instance, in a scene in which he had an eye doctor using an
ophthalmoscope to peer into his eyes, he made a point of having the
doctor clarify that he wasn’t able to see Rogers’s thoughts. Rogers also
wrote a song called “You Can Never Go Down the Drain” because he knew
that drains were something that, to kids, seemed to exist solely to suck
things down.
In 1977, about a decade into the show’s run, Arthur
Greenwald and another writer named Barry Head cracked open a bottle of
scotch while on a break, and coined the term Freddish. They later
created an illustrated manual called “Let’s Talk About Freddish,” a
loving parody of the demanding process of getting all the words just
right for Rogers. “What Fred understood and was very direct and
articulate about was that the inner life of children was deadly serious
to them,” said Greenwald.
Per the pamphlet, there were nine steps for translating into Freddish:
“State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.” Example: It is dangerous to play in the street.
“Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe.
“Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet
make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they
trust.” As in, “Ask your parents where it is safe to play.”
“Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be
considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.” In the example,
that’d mean getting rid of “ask”: Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.
“Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.” That’d be “will”: Your parents can tell you where it is safe to play.
“Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to all children.” Not all children know their parents, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play.
“Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice.” Perhaps: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is good to listen to them.
“Rephrase your new statement, repeating the first step.” “Good” represents a value judgment, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them.
“Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand.” Maybe: Your
favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is
important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part
of growing.
Rogers brought this level of care and attention not just to granular
details and phrasings, but the bigger messages his show would send.
Hedda Sharapan, one of the staff members at Fred Rogers’s production
company, Family Communications, Inc., recalls Rogers once halted taping
of a show when a cast member told the puppet Henrietta Pussycat not to
cry; he interrupted shooting to make it clear that his show would never
suggest to children that they not cry.
In working on the show,
Rogers interacted extensively with academic researchers. Daniel R.
Anderson, a psychologist formerly at the University of Massachusetts who
worked as an advisor for the show, remembered a speaking trip to
Germany at which some members of an academic audience raised questions
about Rogers’s direct approach on television. They were concerned that
it could lead to false expectations from children of personal support
from a televised figure. Anderson was impressed with the depth of
Rogers’s reaction, and with the fact that he went back to production
carefully screening scripts for any hint of language that could confuse
children in that way.
In
fact, Freddish and Rogers’s philosophy of child development is actually
derived from some of the leading 20th-century scholars of the subject.
In the 1950s, Rogers, already well known for a previous children’s TV
program, was pursuing a graduate degree at The Pittsburgh Theological
Seminary when a teacher there recommended he also study under the
child-development expert Margaret McFarland at the University of
Pittsburgh. There he was exposed to the theories of legendary faculty,
including McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Eric Erikson, and T. Berry
Brazelton. Rogers learned the highest standards in this emerging
academic field, and he applied them to his program for almost half a
century.
This is one of the reasons Rogers was so particular about
the writing on his show. “I spent hours talking with Fred and taking
notes,” says Greenwald, “then hours talking with Margaret McFarland
before I went off and wrote the scripts. Then Fred made them better.” As
simple as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood looked and sounded, every detail in it was the product of a tremendously careful, academically-informed process.
