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Fred Rogers on the set of Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood in 1993 (GENE J. PUSKAR / AP)
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
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talking-to-kids/562352/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
10/06/2018 Mr. Rogers's Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Kids - The Atlantic
confuse children, and his team of writers joked that his on-air manner of speaking
amounted to a distinct language they called “Freddish.”
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:
1. “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.
2. “Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe.
3. “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
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talking-to-kids/562352/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
10/06/2018 Mr. Rogers's Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Kids - The Atlantic
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talking-to-kids/562352/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
10/06/2018 Mr. Rogers's Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Kids - The Atlantic
back to production carefully screening scripts for any hint of language that could
confuse children in that way.
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talking-to-kids/562352/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
10/06/2018 Mr. Rogers's Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Kids - The Atlantic
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