Look for the Helpers: Helping Kids Make Sense of a Changing World

The stories adults tell children matter.

Sometimes they teach us who to trust.

Sometimes they teach us who belongs.

And sometimes, like Emma's story about her father, they teach us that being a helper means having the courage to challenge the messages we were given.

That's something Fred Rogers understood deeply.

Children are always learning from adults, not just from what we tell them, but from what we show them.

And that belief guided the way Mr. Rogers talked with children about kindness, fairness, differences, and even some of the hardest moments in our world.

Many of us know Fred Rogers from TV, but the song that keeps coming to my mind right now is Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood? And I used to watch him all the time and I used to sing that song along with him.

I used to love to watch him meet his neighbors and have different conversations with them.

There was just something about the way that he talked that brought you in, made you feel safe and made you feel comfortable.

He was a trailblazer in many ways and even talked about race during times when other people weren't really talking about it, to young children especially.

What are some of the things that you do at Fred Rogers to kind of keep that part alive?

The Fred Rogers Institute focuses on the caring adults in children's lives.

So Fred Rogers Productions is the media company.

They create Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood and other shows that so many of us with young kids are familiar with.

The Fred Rogers Institute holds this other part of the legacy.

And so we focus on supporting parents, caregivers, educators, professionals in all kinds of fields as they are seeking to be good helpers to children, whatever that looks like for them.

One important piece of that, given this legacy we hold, is around how do we support children through really difficult things and really, really hard things to talk about.

Fred Rogers did that so well.

You talked about the safety and comfort that you felt watching Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and He did that really intentionally.

One thing we're really careful to point out through our work at the Institute is that Fred Rogers was not some sort of superhuman person.

He was just a man who chose a career for really important reasons to him and had really clear values about what he believed.

And then he worked very, very hard to create something that aligned with that.

His wife, Joanne, would say, you know, Fred was not a saint.

And at the Institute, we like to keep that as something we know.