My kids are too immature for Mister Rogers
With the new Mister Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood due to open in Toronto this week, I decided to re-watch the 2018 Mister Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in preparation. The doc had moved me when I saw it alone in the theatre the summer before last. Now I could stream it on Netflix from the comfort of my couch, sharing the footage of the real Fred Rogers with my mom and kids before any of us dipped into the Tom Hanks’ version.
I had an idea of the way the viewing would go: my twin daughters, though at eight years old technically too young for the documentary, would watch in wonder, glowing with the comfort and love of Mister Rogers’ authentic message of acceptance. They’d ask to watch his show.
The fact that I’d never liked Mister Rogers as a kid, smirking even as a kindergartner at his cutesy indoor shoe routine, seemed irrelevant because the beauty of his kindness and strength had so bowled me over when I’d watched the documentary as a 44-year-old.
“Is there a Fred Rogers cult,” I’d written on Facebook at the time, “because if there is, I’m ready to join it.”
It felt like no one with a soul could feel otherwise. But of course, they could. One of my daughters spent the first quarter of the documentary on the floor doing homework, glancing up at the TV only occasionally if she thought she heard a curse word. My other daughter took advantage of my diverted attention to purloin my cellphone, then kept loudly interrupting the movie- watching with questions about downloading an app. When she handed me the phone to fix a frozen game she was trying to play in the middle of an emotional moment in the film, I snapped at her that she was going to have to leave the room. As an intellectual matter, I understood the irony of being irate with my child for not appreciating a man with infinite patience and respect for children; but I was still irate.
It didn’t get better when my other daughter finished her homework and snuggled up next to me to more attentively watch the movie. She laughed once at a picture of a bum, and then became delighted when a familiar clip from Pinky and the Brain was shown. It was lost on her that this was meant to be an example of the disrespectful and violent children’s programming that bothered Fred Rogers. This made me wonder if we’ve already ruined her with our lax viewing rules.
At one point, this same daughter smiled at me cheerfully and asked if the real footage from the Vietnam War being shown on screen to give context about the era was part of Mister Rogers’ original show. I gave her a curt shushing. Wanting to share in my enthusiasm for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, I think she’d just been hopeful that the program was livelier than she’d come to think. Never mind that I probably also would have preferred watching combat than bad puppetry at her age; I was embarrassed for her.
The first time I’d watched the documentary, I’d come away feeling as though I’d learned how to be a better parent. This second time, I was just feeling oppressed by my own lack of compassion for my kids.
Some relief came as the documentary reached the point where Rogers’ wife reads a reflection he had penned in the late ’ 70s, expressing doubt about his ability to succeed with a rebooted version of his program. “GET TO IT FRED,” he’d written. “GET TO IT. But don’t let anybody ever tell anybody that it was easy.”
Listening isn’t easy, parenting isn’t easy, and honouring the tender heart in every other human being, no matter how buried it may be, is just plain hard. That Fred Rogers did all these things so unabashedly and diligently — and so well — is inspiring. And maybe it takes the sting of the string of traumas that is life to appreciate the feat — a pain my daughters and I are lucky enough not to have experienced as young girls.
I won’t take my daughters to see Tom Hanks play Fred Rogers. As backward as it sounds, they’re not mature enough yet for Mr. Rogers. But I have a feeling I’ll be pulling out the documentary for them again when they’re in their teens and actively wondering who they are and who they want to be.