It is important to understand children.
Children are not little adults. They do not see the world as adults do, and they process adult concepts differently than adults would.
Mr. Rogers, of the famed Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, understood this well. The excellent book The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers tells the story of this minister for children. The Atlantic published a piece entitled, “Mister Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children” which excerpted some segments of the book. Below is a part of the article. I am bolding some segments I think are particularly important.
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 confuse children, and his team of writers joked that his on-air manner of speaking amounted to a distinct language they called “Freddish.”
Fundamentally, Freddish anticipated the ways its listeners might misinterpret what was being said. For instance, Greenwald mentioned a scene in a hospital in which a nurse inflating a blood-pressure cuff originally said, “I’m going to blow this up.” Greenwald recalls: “Fred made us redub the line, saying, ‘I’m going to puff this up with some air,’ because ‘blow it up’ might sound like there’s an explosion, and he didn’t want the kids to cover their ears and miss what would happen next.”
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 an eye doctor uses 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,” Greenwald said.
Per the pamphlet, there were nine steps for translating into Freddish:
“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.
“Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe.
“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 parents where it is safe to play.”
“Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.” In the example, that’d mean getting rid of “ask”: Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.
“Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.” That’d be “will”: Your parents can tell you where it is safe to play.
“Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to all children.” Not all children know their parents, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play.
“Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice.” Perhaps: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is good to listen to them.
“Rephrase your new statement, repeating the first step.” “Good” represents a value judgment, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them.
“Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand.” Maybe: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.
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.
Undergirding all of Mr. Rogers’ efforts was empathy. He was able to place himself in the mind of a child and envision how he might feel if he were them. Rather than taking an approach where he determined that “that’s life” or “children have to learn sometime” or “everyone has to grow up at some point,” he took extraordinary care with his words and actions to make sure children were not scared, confused or expected to be the adults they weren’t.
Every person understands, on some level, that adults are not children. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, we forbade children to work till a certain age, and specifically forbade them to do hard, dangerous work in factories. At least when it came to protecting their physical bodies, we all agreed that there was a difference between a child and an adult.
But children are different mentally and spiritually as well. One of the ways they differ is in their innocence.
Google defines innocence as “lack of guile or corruption, purity.”
When you look at a baby, you look at an innocent. He smiles up at you with his gummy, toothless grin, drool spilling over his lip. His big blue eyes make contact with yours and you recognize you are in the presence of something beautiful and pure.
The natural state of a child is to grow up open, curious, happy, optimistic and excited to discover the world. Children are natural optimists; otherwise, they would never learn to do anything. Take the example of a child learning to walk. She falls down many, many times. She doesn’t decide that this is proof she cannot learn to walk. Instead, she keeps trying, and ultimately- she does learn to walk.
But we adults have decided to treat children as mini-adults- in ways that are damaging to them.
Here are some examples of ways this does or can occur by well-meaning people.
Anti-Racism for All
Multiple activists have made the claim, “If Black children are old enough to experience racism, other children are old enough to learn about racism and how to be an antiracist.” This is why we now have books for toddlers about anti-racism.
The claim is puzzling for several reasons.
First, there are many injustices that children experience. Chief among them is abuse- domestic, physical and sexual. Indeed, one of the leading causes of death in children ages 1-9 is assault/ homicide (often perpetrated by people who know the child. See more on data pertaining to child death by homicide at this link.) But would parents agree that because there are children who experience horrible abuse and even are murdered at the age of three, my three year old needs to be taught about the forms and ways that children are and can be abused?
In case the answer is not obvious- the answer should be no. Children need to be taught about in an age-appropriate manner about tricky people and bodily safety. They do not need to be socialized to believe harm is lurking everywhere, adults might harm or kill them, and that their world is unsafe. Indeed, doing this to them directly contributes to a decline in their mental health as they grow up.
Second, the assumption the claim makes is that children will naturally grow up racist- without an intervention to make sure they do not. This is surprising. Children are open, questioning, thoughtful individuals. They notice race in the same way they notice gender- but what race means to them will be based on the adults in their lives. The question is how children assign meaning to a category. The way to help children assign positive meanings to a category (such as race, or gender) is to model having wonderful positive interactions with people who fall into that category. Rather than providing a history of racial injustice to my three year old (and yes, there are books for toddlers that do this), I can make sure he sees me interacting with people of all races in positive ways.
Third, education should always be based in love. A statement like, “If Black children are old enough to experience racism, other children are old enough to learn about racism and how to be an antiracist” comes from anger. The person stating it is angry that children who are not Black have the privilege of going through life without being discriminated against. They want children who are not Black to have to deal with a modicum of the pain their children are going through. They will accomplish this by exposing them to the raw, damaging experiences their children have suffered. This is not how to teach. It is certainly not how to teach well. Teaching comes from a place of love and hope, of wanting to build a better world. Teaching out of love would help children learn how to see beauty in other people, such that they want to reach out and include them, not teach them to shoulder guilt that does not belong to them because they were not born a member of a marginalized group.
Hostage Sedarim
There is an effort underway to include mention of the hostages at one’s Passover Seder. (See one example here.) This is noble if you are leading a seder for adults. It has the potential to be terrible if you are leading an intergenerational seder with young children at the table. Remember that children are not like adults, and they do not process events in the same way that adults do - which is why Mr. Rogers was so careful with his words.
Hostage sedarim run the risk of exposing children to information that is too mature for them, that they cannot handle or process, that may scare them, and that may disturb them. Already, because so many children have unsupervised, unfettered access to the Internet (and smart phones and Apple watches), they are allowed to trawl through information that is not right for them. But sometimes, children stumble upon it through no fault of their own.
This is what happened to my daughter. She is in fourth grade. A classmate handed out specialized Tehillim that were put together in the merit of each of the hostages. Each one contains a brief biography of a hostage. My daughter read each of the biographies, which meant she came home and asked me, “What is rape?” Of course I answered her question- and also her question as to what “sexual assault” was. But I was fortunate that she has a relationship with me where she can come home and feel comfortable asking me these questions. A different child would have been more likely to Google those terms, and arrive at answers and information that would flood their system with confusion, fear, worry and dread. This is not what a nine year old needs to be experiencing. In contrast, this is a time when they should be learning to feel in control of themselves and their environment, to keep on growing and experience that delicious sense of “I did it!” We want to raise children who feel capable and have the capacity to grow- through experiencing appropriate levels of risk. (See more on this concept by reading up on the LetGrow movement.)
Sometimes people ask an iteration of the question I raised above- if Israeli children are old enough to experience terror, aren’t American children old enough to learn about it? To this I definitively say: no. Just because a four year old and a one year old, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, were kidnapped by Hamas, does not mean my four year old and one year old need to be told this occurred. The experience my four year old would be likely to have in the wake of being told this would look something like: Who are these bad men? Are they here? Will they come for me? Will I be taken? Did he go back home to his Mommy? Where is he now? In short: it will increase his fear and worry, and cause him to wonder whether he is safe. Absolutely nothing good will come of this.
What we can and should do is encourage children to do things that empower them. If we believe they are old enough, we can tell them (in language they understand) what happened on October 7. One framing might be: “You know how you learned about Haman, the wicked man who wanted to kill the Jews? On October 7, bad people like Haman hurt Jews in the Land of Israel. Together, we are going to pray for those Jews to be safe.” And then we can pray together, or give charity together, or otherwise do something active and age-appropriate that increases rather than decreases a child’s hope.
We want to raise hopeful, empowered, optimistic children. One of the best ways to do this is to teach them that they have power, including, most importantly, the power to do good. Their prayers matter. The charity they give matters. Their joy matters. Preserving joy is essential. It is not wrong for my child to be joyous even when another child is kidnapped in Gaza.
Sexualization of Children
My daughter recently attended a karaoke event with her friends. As songs were queued up, it became clear that she knew very few of them. That’s because the majority of popular music contains information that is too mature for her. These are songs about break ups, romance, sex, drug use and the like. I listen to many of these songs and I enjoy them- but I am an adult. I do not play these songs in front of my children.
Here’s an example: Taylor Swift’s current music contains swear words and romantic or sexualized encounters. Swift is a woman who does a lot of good, is generous, supports important causes, and many people find that her music resonates with them. I’m glad of it! But I think we lose something when those people are young kids.
There are kids who are word perfect on her music even though they don’t know what it means. They idolize her. They try to dress like her, which is to say- to dress sexy. I think we can all agree a nine year old should not be sexy. I, and I’d like to believe there are others out there like me, want to raise a child who gets to discover the world on her own terms. She gets to determine her own likes and dislikes, the clothing she enjoys, and who she wants to be- without aping the clothing, aspirations, and body language of a woman more than 3x her age.
Why sexualize a nine year old? Why sell her outfits in the style of Taylor Swift, or teach her to passionately sing songs about love affairs and break ups? She is a child. She has her own dreams and naturally, they are not the dreams of a 34 year old. The things she is curious about, imagines, wonders about and experiences deserve to be heard. She is herself, and that is better than her being an imitation of anybody else.
So how should we raise children?
In the words of Alison Gopnik, think about child rearing as being a gardener rather than a carpenter. Jonathan Haidt references her in his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, and quotes Gopnik as saying:
Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys…We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn. (268)
We are curators. We are the ultimate curators. If I want to safeguard my child’s innocence, and make sure she grows up playful, happy, secure, feeling safe and feeling optimistic about her ability to do things and impact the world, then…
…I will not allow her to be exposed to damaging binary narratives that are us and them focused (Whites vs. Blacks, for example.)
…I will not allow her to be exposed to terrifying, overwhelming information that includes explicit details regarding the abuse of and suffering of the hostages.
…I will not allow her childhood to be stolen from her so that she can be taught to become a sexy siren at the age of nine.
I will safeguard her innocence. Because she deserves to grow up innocent. She deserves for childhood to differ in fundamental, important ways from adulthood. She deserves to live joyfully. She deserves not to feel fear.
There will come a day when my daughter learns about corruption, guile, people’s duplicity and how much evil can hide within the human heart. Indeed, she already has learned about it in age appropriate ways. She knows about Haman, Hamas, and the Holocaust.
But she is learning about evil slowly. Her overall orientation is that people are good- and that is how it should be. While society shrills and shrieks that evil and calamity surround us everywhere- racism, gun violence, climate change, alleged genocide- I have created a space of calm around my daughter. That chaos will not touch her. She will not grow up suspicious of everyone, slotting people into categories of “good” or “evil,” or having nightmares that the world will end.
Because I am the curator, and this is the childhood I am creating.
She is too precious for me to do otherwise.