Book Review-The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers: Spiritual Insights from the World’s Most Beloved Neighbor

The actual source of my memory is lost to the sands of time.  We lived in a few houses during the first few years of my life.  I can remember seeing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood – but I can’t remember which home I was at.  I never knew Mister Rogers as a Presbyterian minister.  What I missed in my early experiences was The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers: Spiritual Insights from the World’s Most Beloved Neighbor.

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There are only a few books that I remember where I was introduced to them.  Heroic Leadership is one of those books.  That plane ride and the simple Iowa woman who was studying seminary introduced me to a different way of Christianity.  I’d grown up going to church, and I thought the only way to share Christ was through preaching.  I learned what Saint Francis of Assisi already knew: “Preach the gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.”  In other words, embody what it is like to be Christ (as best as a human can) and don’t worry about preaching, your actions will do that.

For millions of people, Fred Rogers was that: the embodiment of love and acceptance.  Of course, no man is perfect, and his family could see his foibles and might see things differently.  But, for the countless children who watched the show, there was a person who cared.

The Accuser or the Advocate

Both the accuser and the advocate expose problems.  It’s not exposing the problems of the world that is inherently good or bad but rather what you do about it.  Criticizing someone without a framework for how to make it better makes you the accuser.  Even an inkling of how we might move forward and past the described limitations changes the conversation completely.

In Think Again, Adam Grant shares a framework from Phil Tetlock.  (See Superforecasting for more of Tetlock’s great work.)  The framework is of the preacher, the politician, the scientists, and the prosecutors.  It’s best summarized by the graphic from Think Again:

The accuser, in Tetlock’s framework, is either the politician or the prosecutor – attacking the other side.  In Grant’s view, the best person to be is the scientist.  However, just because one is a scientist doesn’t stop someone from being appropriately critical of things that are wrong.  Richard Feynman explains that sometimes this isn’t easy particularly when the error of another is considered fact.  It’s a slow, painful process with many steps.

It’s appropriate to challenge the slow, measured, simplistic style of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and expose the limitations – which led it to be what it is.  Rogers was often criticized for his pace and focus on feelings, but Rogers kept leaning in on the research and trying to be an advocate for children even when others criticized him.

Hope

For a two-to-five year old (Rogers’ core audience) who didn’t have anything stable in their life, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was an alien world.  There wasn’t any yelling, fighting, throwing things, or even unpredictable anger.  Fred Rogers lived his entire television life in one home.  A child learning more about attachment bonds could see that stability was possible – even if it’s not possible in their circumstances.  (See Attached for more on attachment.)  This awareness could give them hope.

Rick Snyder in The Psychology of Hope says hope is a cognitive process that is built on two components.  The first is waypower, or knowing how something could happen.  The second is willpower, or the force to make the necessary changes.  Often overlooked in this model is the truth that these both operate internally and externally.  Seeing a world that existed without the day-to-day fear that some children were subjected to instilled hope in them by showing that other people knew how to create these environments.

Where Sesame Street was focused on intellectual learning, Rogers was focused on emotional learning.  (See “G” is for Growing for more on Sesame Street.)  Rogers knew that his work needed to be measured and clear so that young minds could absorb it.  More importantly, he wanted to instill the ability to self-regulate emotions, which takes skills and the space to practice them.

Internalization

Deep into the research on attachment theory and secure attachment is a concept of internalization.  It’s a concept where the people that you’ve lost leave imprints on you in such strong ways that you can continue to retain a relationship with them after they’re gone.  For Rogers, this internalization included toast sticks.  A kindly old neighbor in Latrobe would make him toast and cut it into sticks.  One day not long before she died, she taught the five-year-old Rogers how to make the toast and cut them.  He was able to take that new skill with him – and to think about her every time he made them.

We internalize people partly by what they teach us but also by learning how they would react to a situation.  We can predict how they might behave whether they’re present or not.  (See Mindreading for more on our predictive capacity.)  This internalization allows us to become the best of the others that we encounter in life.

Space

The thing that Rogers created for himself and others was space.  From the intentional, slow movement through the program to the routine that had him up every morning, he knew how easy it is to get distracted in a world full of noise.  He inherently understood the value of reflection.  (See Quiet for more.)  While a television personality himself, he rarely watched television.  Mostly, he preferred to read.  Though he didn’t say it, in those days, television was live, which doesn’t create an opportunity to pause and reflect.  Obviously, he had no inherent problem with television, it just wasn’t the way he chose to spend most of his time.

I’m not sure what Rogers would make of the ever-increasing pace that has come since his death.  In the two decades since his passing, we’ve moved in ways that annihilate silence and venerate noise.  Everything has been tweeted or turned into a TikTok reel.  We can select our noise – as long as it’s not selecting silence.

Relationship

The essence of prayer is relationship.  It’s a relationship with God.  More specifically, the literal meaning of the language of prayer is the exchanging of worries for faith.  We’re engaging in a relationship with a benevolent father, who takes on our worries and fears and responds with simple assurances that he is present.  Relationships are built through talking.  They’re built through sharing experiences.  Relationships form on the basis of a desire to understand and on understanding.  As we pray, we open ourselves up to relationships with God – and to hearing what God has to say.

Sometimes the person we’re relating to on Earth is a “cornball” – one of the ways that Rogers is described.  We all have our quirks, and by all accounts, so did he.  His idiosyncrasies left him slightly out of step with the world – in his case, perhaps in a way that endeared him to the children he sought to serve.  Perhaps by demonstrating he wasn’t perfect, he made it a little easier for children who watched to accept their imperfections, too.

Feelings Matter

There’s a tendency to validate whether a fear is rational or reasonable given a set of circumstances.  Our brains evaluate emotions and judge their validity in ourselves and others – and it’s not one of our better features.  What feelings need is acceptance, not judgement.  If we accept a feeling as real – irrespective of the reality – we can move forward towards working through or with the emotion.

Richard Lazarus in Emotion and Adaptation and Lisa Feldman Barrett in How Emotions Are Made help us to understand that there are cognitive processes, often operating below our conscious awareness, that are designed to keep us safe.  Because they’re protectors, we should respect them – even if we don’t always listen to them.  They deserve to be recognized.

Is a fear of heights rational?  From an evolutionary perspective, yes.  The risk of falling was largely unpredictable and represented a threat.  Is it rational in a skyscraper?  Probably not – but by acknowledging the roots, we can understand how it makes sense even if the current conditions don’t match the need for fear.

One of Rogers’ key beliefs was that public television had the power to educate children (and adults) that feelings are mentionable and therefore manageable.  He believed that feelings matter.

Mendable

A broken arm is mendable.  The trauma of almost – but not actually – losing a sibling or child is mendable.  We will, given time and the right support, grow past the traumas and perhaps even into stronger versions of ourselves.  (See Posttraumatic Growth for more.)  However, there are some situations which aren’t mendable.  False accusations create a sense of doubt and fear around a person which aren’t fair – and they’re non-repairable.  Cardinal Bernardin was falsely accused of sexual abuse of a college student, Steven Cook.  While the accusations were ultimately proven false, they left a permanent mark on a good man.  Still, the Cardinal proved what Dr. Orr, one of Rogers’ mentors, had said long ago about the only thing that evil could not stand – forgiveness.  Bernardin forgave Steven Cook and showed that even broken hearts can be mended.

Perhaps if we need to know that we’re mendable and that we can be mended, we can find assurance in The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers.

Book Review-The Mister Rogers Effect: 7 Secrets to Bringing Out the Best in Yourself and Others from America’s Beloved Neighbor

There are probably neighbors you have today – or you’ve had in the past – whom you don’t want to emulate.  They’re the people you didn’t click with and didn’t form relationships with.  However, most of those who grew up with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood would love to understand The Mister Rogers Effect: 7 Secrets to Bringing Out the Best in Yourself and Others from America’s Beloved Neighbor.  Fred Rogers seemed to have that effect on us – bringing out our best.  How he did it was a mystery, but the fact that it happened would bring us warmth.

The Principles

A simple question led to the identification of seven psychological principles that were embodied in Rogers’ work.  The author, Anita Knight Kuhnley, trains counselors.  She found that Rogers resonated with her students – even before she was able to articulate the principles:

• Listen First
• Validate Feelings
• Pause and Think
• Show Gratitude
• Develop Empathy
• Practice Acceptance
• Establish Security

Listen First

“Can you hear me now?” is a famous quote from Verizon commercials.  It speaks to the telephone connection between two (or more) parties.  It speaks to the problems that we have in communicating with others – framed in the limitations of technology.  We take for granted that the person we’re speaking with – across the room or across the globe – can hear us.  We expect that the words we use will be converted to pressure waves that they can decode.  More than that, we assume that the words we use will mean the same thing to them that they mean to us.  We expect that the other person will hear and understand.

Unfortunately, we’re so overwhelmed by communications (see The Organized Mind) and notifications from our technology (see Alone Together) that the assumption of listening is shattered before we even enter the realm of the other person’s mind and the distractions that occur inside their head.  (See Motivational Interviewing.)

Though we assume listening exists and expect it, we know that it takes focus and skills.  Motivational Interviewing and The Ethnographic Interview both focus on the ability to listen to others as the foundation, but it’s hard.  It’s hard to shut off the torrent of thoughts and ideas to be present enough in the moment with the other person to listen carefully.  (If you speak with children, you may want to look at How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk as well.)

Listening isn’t really the goal.  It’s the first step, but the real goal is to understand the other person, to understand the way they view the world and process the things that happen to and around them.  Listening is just the tool we use to achieve that understanding.

Validate Feelings

“Don’t cry.”  It’s a sentence uttered by parents everywhere.  While intended to bring comfort, it belies a simple truth.  The parent isn’t comfortable with the child’s emotions.  In the land of learning, children are taught that emotions are scary to others, and they should be kept to oneself.  Rogers’ perspective is that feelings should be mentionable and manageable.  We shouldn’t hide our feelings under a rock.

Some parents believe that they should be there to protect their children.  If their child is feeling pain (even psychological pain), they should be able to solve it.  The fact that this is an unreasonable and unnecessary burden doesn’t make it any lighter.  We know that chicks need to break their shells and sea turtles need to fight their way to the water, because if they don’t, they won’t survive very long.  (See Posttraumatic Growth.)  Struggle is a part of the animal kingdom – all the way up to humans.

There are two key issues with the failure to validate feelings.  First, it will drive people away from secure attachment towards insecure attachment with the corresponding impacts.  (See Attached.)  Second, we have an innate need to be understood.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  When someone cannot or will not understand our feelings, it can lead to loneliness.  (See Loneliness.)  Even if you can’t reach the level of understanding, simply being willing to sit with someone to help them feel less alone can be immensely helpful.

Pause and Think

In a world of rapid swipes on our phone to send away new stories, videos, and people, we’ve almost engineered a world in which we don’t want people to pause and think.  We’ve encouraged people to fill every moment of their day.  Newspapers struggle, because people have every form and topic of news at their fingertips, so they need not spend an instant of boredom or encounter a moment where they might have to think.

Even at home, people often have a television on generating a constant stream of noise to block out the potential to stop and think.  Today, it seems like we’re more afraid of what thoughts that we might have if we paused to think than we are of being in an accident.  Why are our thoughts so scary to us?

In a conversation with Chuck Underwood (author of America’s Generations), I was struck by the different in the way we processed information.  To be the kind of scholar that Underwood is, you must pay attention to the news, making clippings and notes of the events that may shape a generation.  Conversely, I rarely look at the news.  I spend more time diving deep into the current books about a topic – and, quite frequently, going back to their sources to understand how the author’s perspectives were shaped.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in The Little Prince, says “One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”  (Translated from French.)  Rogers had the original French version on the wall of his office.  The surface things that we see when we’re going so fast through our days aren’t really the full experience.  Finding our way to the heart of the matter takes time for us to pause and think.

Show Gratitude

There’s value to looking for the positive in things.  Rick Hansen in Hardwiring Happiness focuses on what we can do to generally think about things in a more positive way – including the addition of gratitude.  Dan Richo in How to Be an Adult in Relationships explains the value of appreciation – that is, gratitude for other people.

Develop Empathy

Empathy isn’t as complicated as people make it out to be.  Empathy is “I understand this about you.”  It can be cognitively, understanding background, hobbies, or aspirations.  It can be – and is most frequently used in conjunction with – understanding how another person feels.  Empathy is sometimes confused with sympathy, which is substantially different.  Sympathy doesn’t express understanding of the other person, but rather it understands their undesirable situation – “It sucks to be you.”  (See Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion, and Altruism for more.)

Sometimes, even empathy gets a bad reputation.  However, as Against Empathy explains, it’s not empathy itself that’s the problem, it’s what people do with that empathy.

Practice Acceptance

The Dalai Lama is known for compassion – which is appropriate.  (See The Dalai Lama’s Big Book of Happiness for more on the Dalai Lama.)  What most people don’t realize is that acceptance is an important raw material for compassion (see An Appeal to the World).  You can understand someone, but until you accept them, it’s hard to desire to resolve their problems.  That’s why it’s not just empathy that’s required, it’s acceptance as well.

In After the Ball, we learn that acceptance is a pathway towards eliminating fear and hatred.  If we can practice acceptance, we’ll be less likely to find reasons to divide.  Rogers is well known for showing himself and a black actor playing an officer putting their feet into the same kiddie pool as a sign that the race inequality wasn’t right.

Establish Security

We can’t exist fully as humans unless we can feel safe.  When people are driven with fear, they don’t operate at their best, as Amy Edmondson explains in The Fearless Organization.  If we want to experience the best that humanity has to offer, we need to create safety.  Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone speaks to the erosion of social capital that has decreased our overall sense of safety.  (He continues this line of thought in Our Kids.)

One of the greatest things that we can offer to others are the principles of Fred Rogers to extend to them The Mister Rogers Effect.