How did Mr. Rogers do that?

Ryan Rydzewski and Gregg Behr dive deep into the simple magic of Fred Rogers in 'When You Wonder, You're Learning'

Ryan Rydzewski is co-author, with Gregg Behr, of “When You Wonder, You’re Learning: Mister Rogers' Enduring Lessons for Raising Creative, Curious, Caring Kids.”

Your book “When You Wonder, You’re Learning” is out now in paperback. Tell me a little bit of the story of this book — how it came to be — and also what you hope readers get out of it. 

Gregg and I are both Pittsburghers, we live in Mister Rogers’ real-life neighborhood, where he lived and worked and built the Neighborhood. So to a certain degree, Fred is in the water around here. We also grew up watching him; he was a presence in my house every day and in Gregg’s house, so like a lot of people, we just grew up with this deep sort of emotional connection to Fred.

The question that we started to think about is, how? Ho did Fred do that? How did he do that for so many people of so many different generations from so many different walks of life for so many decades in a row? Fred's appeal crossed racial, generational, political divides; how did he create that good feeling in so many different people? We started to think, maybe there's another story to be told about Fred besides the story of his life.

Gregg and I work for the Grable Foundation, which is a Pittsburgh-based philanthropy that supports kids and families and teachers. So part of our responsibility is to figure out what works well. How are we supporting educational causes that are backed by science and proven to be effective? So we had to dig in to the learning science. What does science tell us about how kids learn best? What does it tell us about what’s most important about teaching and parenting and supporting communities?

What I really expected when we first started digging into this stuff was that this is going to be really boring and it’s going to be scientists talking about pedagogical things that I don’t necessarily understand. But what we found was completely the opposite. Scientists — people who know more than anyone else in the world about this — were talking about, how do we make kids feel safe, how do we make sure they belong to a community that cares about them, how do we make them feel loved? These scientists sounded like scriptwriters in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. They were saying the same things that Fred was saying 50 years ago.

So that’s a long way of saying, we started to look at Fred as more than just that nice guy in a sweater; we started to look at him as a learning scientist — someone who actually understood these scientific principles that have been proven to be effective. And once we had that sort of thesis, it was everywhere we looked. He had studied with some of the top pediatricians and scientists of the times. He was very much immersed in what came to be called learning science. And Fred as a learning scientist was decades ahead of his time. What he was doing in the 1950s is the same thing we hear scientists saying, This is what we have to do today. He was really an intellectual and professional educator in ways that he doesn’t always get credit for, and I hope that’s what our book hopes to bring to light.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is more than just that program that brings back nice feelings. It is a blueprint. It is a proven path toward raising more curious, creative, caring kids. It’s something that if we study as parents or as teachers or people who work with and are about kids, it can help point the way forward for creating learning spaces, learning environments, neighborhoods, in which every kid can thrive.

You mention how ahead of his time Fred Rogers was. So why aren’t we doing what Fred Rogers knew to do back in the 1950s? What do you think has made it maybe hard or challenging for us to raise kids this way, to educate kids this way, and to be in community with kids the way he showed us?

Part of it was that Fred was too good at what he was doing. The causal viewer would not necessarily know that everything Fred is doing was grounded in some sort of science. Fred blended it so well with art and poetry and stories and song that you wouldn’t really know the learning science was there. He wasn’t necessarily explaining what the science was. So I think the value of our book and the fun of this project is to sort of decode and unpack that science in a way that is helpful to parents and teachers and yet which was never really explicitly explained for them. It was never really made accessible or plain.

We have a foreword from Fed’s now late wife, and she talks about the neighborhood as being a blueprint. A blueprint isn’t necessarily something you see unless you go and search for it. But it can be really helpful if you want to build your own version of it.

So why aren’t we doing what Fred taught us how to do? We haven’t recognized that Fred was teaching us how to do things. We see him as someone who created this wonderful television program and we sort of forget about it as adults. If we can go back to the neighborhood with fresh eyes, once you start to grasp what it is that Fred was trying to accomplish, you see it everywhere.

It’s so true that when things are done well and artfully, you don’t see the strings moving. And it doesn’t always provoke us to stop and think about what’s really going on.

I didn’t think I could appreciate Fred any more. I was worried about spoiling the magic if I peek behind the curtain. But everything he did, he had a reason for. That is an incredible amount of labor for one person to sustain. It’s an incredible amount of intention for one person.

What a gift it is to have something that was prepared with that amount of care. There’s not enough of that in the world.

One of the most amazing moments was going to the Fred Rogers Archive in Latrobe. It’s where Fred grew up and where his archives are housed, on the campus of St. Vincent College. You walk into this room and it’s totally unremarkable, just stacks of boxes. You would never know what a special place you’re in until you open them up. It’s almost 50 years of correspondence, kids and parents and teachers writing ot Fred and a surprising number of letters from folks in nursing homes just thanking Fred for being present in their lives. He responded to all of them, and you can go to the archive and you can see his handwritten notes in the margins. You can see how he’s thinking about how he wants to respond to each individual person.

So how have you been impacted by spending this time with Fred?

It’s a double-edged sword. I no longer have the luxury of looking at Mister Rogers and thinking, Oh, well, that was Fred, he was special, I could never do that. If anything, this peek behind the curtain revealed that Fred was just a regular person like us. He made mistakes, he got angry, he was the person we saw on screen, but the person we saw on screen wasn’t perfect.

And so in demystifying Fred, I see him as a fellow human being, rather than something I could never be. In some ways, that is encouraging, because that means, I could be like Fred too, or more Fred-like in my own way. In other ways, it puts a lot more responsibility on me. If I know I can be like Fred, I don’t have an excuse for not doing it.

So it has absolutely changed me as a person. I feel a responsibility to be Fred-like in my own way. In the way I listen to people, whether that’s the people in my family or the people I meet on the street, in the way I speak to them and the way I respond to them, I’ve become way less judgmental I hope, and I’ve become I think a little less sure of myself in a good way. It’s also clarifying as a new parent, because the one thing that was at the core of Fred’s neighborhood was the idea of, I like you just the way you are. With all the things that make you happy and all your imperfections — I like all of that. And if I can convey that to my son and to my wife and really to everyone I meet, then I feel like I’m on the right path.

When you think about how you want to approach parenting, how does that look similar or different compared to your own family of origin?

I feel like my parents did create that feeling for me. I think I realized when I was older that it’s not like that for everybody. And I think I was even older than that when I realized how much it matters. We talk about curiosity and there’s this fascinating paradox where kids are only willing to go out and take risks if they have a safe home base. You have to feel safe in order to go into a situation where you might feel unsafe. They can help you grow, but in order to go explore, you have to feel comfortable first at home. And I always felt comfortable at home and I’m grateful for that.

What I worry about is that I don’t have a model for creating and maintaining that feeling in the age of social media and smart phones, and I see what it’s doing to the world and especially to young people. On the whole, I am really worried about how to navigate that kind of thing with my son. I have no idea how it’s going to impact him and what that technology is going to look like.

It’s difficult to maintain that atmosphere Fred created when it’s kind of being gnawed at by this electronic noise. Fred used to say the deep and simple is better than shallow and complex. The world I want to create for my son is deep and simple.

I guess the good news is, the same idea still holds true: If you can give your son that place of comfort and safety and acceptance at home, he will be equipped to go out and explore the digital world as well.

I’ve met so many people on the road promoting this book, and you start to hear the same things over and over again, from all sorts of different people. I feel like I’ve heard more than a handful of times from parents of every age that it boils down to, all you have to do is love them, and the rest will fall into place. That might be overly simple, but I hope there’s a kernel of truth to it.

One parenting maxim that has really stuck with me is the idea that we can’t give our kids anything that we don’t already have. And it’s freeing, in a way, because it means we don’t have to do it all, but also heavy to think about sometimes.

We always talk about Fred himself, but in watching hundreds of episodes, Fred is a minor character in some episodes. He’s always bringing other people in — and it’s people who can bring kids things he can’t give them himself. We get Julia Child and Wynton Marsalis and Yo-Yo Ma. Fred even talked explicitly about the fact that, some people can do some things, some can do other things. Bringing all those people, even just everyday characters, he brought us this smorgasbord that we could sample from and it didn't have to be all Fred all the time. In fact, he was always pointing our attention elsewhere. That’s something that I’m also trying to remember. If I don’t have something, maybe there’s somebody else in my community who can give that to me or my family.

One very last thing before we go, I’d love to hear what is something that’s bringing you joy in your life right now. That could be personally or professionally. 

Right how it’s the sun, because it’s amazing to see the sun again. More broadly, my 10-month-old son and my wife. It’s fun like 95% of the time right now. It’s relationships for sure, that’s what’s bringing me joy.

And second, this book came out two years ago —April 2021 — which means for sort of 3 years for research and 2 years of writing and 2 years of promotion, I’ve got to spend almost coming up on a decade talking about Mister Rogers professionally and I’m so grateful for that. A, because who better to talk about, but B, because I’m still learning from him. It’s always different, every day I go back to him, I’m bringing something else out of the well and I’m able to bring that to other people. So this whole journey has just been amazing.

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You can read more about Ryan, Gregg, and “When You Wonder, You’re Learning” at whenyouwonder.org.