Mister Rogers on the merits of discipline

Celebrating Fred Rogers on the 20th anniversary of his death

Fred Rogers told children they were special, each and every one of them. He routinely reminded his young audience that they each had unique contributions to offer the world, but that they didn't need to do anything extraordinary to be loved. This is what his followers admired most about him and what his critics judged him for. In the eyes of some, he was lifting kids up, in the eyes of others, he was creating narcissists. What often goes missing from both praise and criticism of Mister Rogers is his emphasis on self-discipline. 

Mister Rogers talked about feelings, a lot. A central focus of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was the emotions that children experience in response to any number of scenarios—death, divorce, and so forth—and how they ought to deal with them. He wanted kids to know that things will happen in their life that arouse emotional responses, and that there are appropriate ways to react to those feelings. Knowing how to react to difficult situations was, in his eyes, a crucial part of growing into an adult. He stressed that challenging situations that elicit emotions such as anger or frustration require self-control; they require discipline. 

Mister Rogers also shared a message of discipline in how he talked about making the best of a child's uniqueness. He told kids that they have something unique to offer the world, something that makes them special and different from anyone else. Aristotle and Plato wrote about the idea of harmony in a city—cobblers offer something different than bakers, for example, which both meet the needs of citizens and allow the city to properly function—and compared such harmony to music. Mister Rogers did the same. He described playing in a symphony orchestra to conjure an image of bringing individuals together to create one piece of music. The unique talents of each musician is what makes a song, which is true of other scenarios, like making a city run.

"Music has given me a way of expressing my feelings and my thoughts, and it has also given me a way of understanding more about life. For example, as you play together in a symphony orchestra, you can appreciate that each musician has something fine to offer. Each one is different, though, and you each have a different 'song to sing.' When you sing together, you make one voice. That's true of all endeavors, not just musical ones. Finding ways to harmonize our uniqueness with the uniqueness of others can be the most fun—and the most rewarding—of all."

Mister Rogers used this message of uniqueness to encourage kids to work hard at realizing their wishes and meet their goals. In other words, it's not enough to be unique, children have to learn how to fold that uniqueness into the choices they make in life and when deciding what they will contribute to their family and community as adults. Uniqueness, in other words, wasn't just to be celebrated, it was to be utilized, put into action.

To celebrate Mister Rogers on the 20th anniversary of his death, here are some quotes from the book, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember, on the importance of discipline.

"I like to swim, but there are some days I just don't feel much like doing it—but I do it anyway! I know it's good for me and I promised myself I'd do it every day, and I like to keep my promises. That's one of my disciplines. And it's a good feeling after you've tried and done something well. Inside you think, 'I've kept at this and I've really learned it—not by magic, but by my own work.'"

"Imaging something may be the first step in making it happen, but it takes the real time and real efforts of real people to learn things, make things, turn thoughts into deeds or vision into inventions."

"What makes the difference between wishing and realizing our wishes? Lots of things, of course, but the main one, I think, is whether we link our wishes to our active work. It may take months or years, but it's far more likely to happen when we care so much that we'll work as hard as we can to make it happen. And when we're working toward the realization of our wishes, some of our greatest strengths come from the encouragement of people who care about us."

"When I was young (about eight or ten years old), I was trying to learn so many things all at once, things like the piano and organ and algebra and cooking and typing, and I even started to take clarinet lessons. But I just didn't practice the clarinet, so I didn't learn. I think I wanted to learn by magic. I think that I had the idea that if I got the clarinet I would somehow know how to play it. But magic doesn't work with learning, not with anything really worthwhile."

"As work grows out of play, an attitude toward work grows with it—an attitude that may persist all through our workaday life. That attitude can have a lot to do with how we accept challenges, how we can cope with failures, and whether we can find the inner fulfillment that makes working, in and of itself, worthwhile."

"Discipline is a teaching-learning kind of relationship as the similarity of the word disciple suggests. By helping our children learn to be self-disciplined, we are also helping them learn how to become independent of us as, sooner or later, they must. And we are helping them learn how to be loving parents to children of their own."