by Maxwell King
Once again, Fred Rogers was stuck. He had ended his work on The Children’s Corner at WQED during the last year of his studies at the seminary, mostly so he could finish those studies and get his degree. Now he was without a program or any sort of base from which to advance his work with children. Josie Carey had moved on to full-time work at KDKA. Fred began to spend some time volunteering at early childhood education centers recommended by Dr. McFarland, testing some of his creative work with puppets and music to see how children in the centers responded to his own performances, without Josie and the trappings of the Corner. He was encouraged, and he enjoyed working with the children and their teachers. But it wasn’t television; it wasn’t his calling.
When Fred ended the Corner, Josie was upset and unhappy, but she accepted his explanation that he needed to focus on his studies. Margaret McFarland had inspired him. He believed in the work he could do for children with her help. And he believed that all the pieces he had been fashioning into a new professional life—television, education, the ministry, the puppets, the theater, music—could come together in a way that might make the most important work he had ever imagined. He just needed a television program.
8.
DR. MARGARET MCFARLAND
Fred Rogers’s key advisor and collaborator—you might even call her his childhood-education guru—sits in her home outside Pittsburgh for a videotaped interview. It’s 1988; Dr. Margaret McFarland and Fred Rogers have worked together for thirty years. Her input on almost all the scripts and songs of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was the defining element of her career in child development. It was a field she chose as a young girl, and she never wavered from her determination to help children and families.
Eighty-three years old, in a white blouse and a dusty-rose-colored jacket, Dr. McFarland looks small, thin, and frail, with a toothy smile framed by a prominent chin and nose: a little bit of Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, but kinder. In a wavering voice, she speaks slowly and deliberately. The deep chair that frames her makes her appear even more diminutive and childlike.
The interview is an attempt by Rogers and PBS station WQED to get some of her thinking on tape for posterity. Over the course of an hour and a half, Dr. McFarland’s deep intelligence and her authoritative explanations give an ever-increasing weight to her presence. The effect, which builds throughout, is to assert her power as an intellect and as a teacher. She is suffering from an abdominal ailment and seems slightly uncomfortable throughout. In just a few months, Dr. Margaret McFarland will be dead; but her legacy lives on, with millions of children who grew up on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Though Margaret McFarland was a slight figure with a soft voice, she was also an exceptionally forceful woman who knew exactly what she wanted to accomplish. She was uncommonly successful at reaching her goals, which always revolved around young children and their needs. She spent years researching and teaching about child development, and she worked with the most influential people in her field: Dr. Benjamin Spock at the University of Pittsburgh and the Arsenal Center (before Spock moved to Cleveland to teach at Western Reserve University, now Case Western Reserve University); T. Berry Brazelton, another famed pediatrician who taught at Pitt and Harvard; and Erik Erikson, the psychologist who did so much to shape thinking about childhood and taught at Harvard and Berkeley.
All these giants in the field of human development revered McFarland. Erikson once said, “Margaret McFarland knew more than anyone in this world about families with young children.”1
When she answers a question in the videotaped interview, she smiles broadly. The camera never strays far from her face as she tells a story about the connections Fred Rogers made with children at her University of Pittsburgh research and teaching facility, the Arsenal Family & Children’s Center: “There was a little girl at the Arsenal whose bird died. And when Fred came with his puppets, and she told Fred about the death of the bird—when he got the puppets out of his satchel, she found it urgent to tell each of the puppets about the death of the canary.
“The children confided to Fred and to his puppets many important things,” she says, and then describes what gave Fred Rogers such rapport with little children: “Fred can recall—and can afford to recall—his own childhood.”2
She focuses on how comfortable Rogers was making a direct connection back to his earliest years—the very thing that first impressed McFarland, who was sustained by the same powerful connection to her own childhood.
During the second half of the interview, McFarland observes how Fred Rogers’s cultural sophistication lent weight to his programming for preschoolers: “You see, Fred Rogers has had . . . experience far beyond most of us. He’s traveled. He’s studied French with rich people. He reads Greek for pleasure.”
She notes how daunted children can be to encounter Fred Rogers out in the real world: “One day, a young mother was coming down the street . . . and her two-and-a-half [-year-old] was hip-hopping ahead of her . . . when he saw Fred.
“The little boy stopped dead in his tracks, turned around and fled, hiding behind his mother’s skirts. He knew Mister Rogers from television, and didn’t know what to make of seeing the man on the street near his own home. When Fred walked ahead, the boy followed him all the way to Rogers’s house, into which Mister Rogers disappeared.”
Rogers saw that the little boy was still standing outside, conflicted, but hoping to see more of the host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers reemerged from his house, talked to the little boy, and then walked all the way back down the street toward the boy’s house, quietly conversing with him. “I think children perceived him as sometimes childlike, but often as though he were a parent,” explains Dr. McFarland.3
Dr. Margaret McFarland grew up in Oakdale, Pennsylvania, in the suburbs outside Pittsburgh, in the early part of the twentieth century, part of a large population of Scots-Irish and German immigrants who’d come to the rivers and mountains of western Pennsylvania to work in the mills and the mines in the second half of the nineteenth century. Margaret adored and admired her father, a Scotsman with a thick brogue. Later she told friends that as a little girl, she’d always wanted to be introduced as the daughter of Mr. McFarland, and never to be introduced by her own given name. But that hope was short-lived: Her father was an invalid who died when Margaret was just five years old.4
Years later, talking with Fred Rogers in her office at the University of Pittsburgh, McFarland marveled at how critically important each parent can be to a child. Each parent, she explained, sounds different, feels different, even smells different to the child, who needs all the distinct qualities of the mother and the father to feel whole. One can sense, in McFarland’s conversation with Rogers, the terrible desperation the little girl felt when she lost her father. Margaret McFarland turned to her mother, full of fear that she could just as suddenly and unexpectedly lose her, too.
Margaret’s mother tried to make up for the loss by spending more time with the little girl, talking with her all the time, and giving her the love and attention she feared she was missing from her father. In this, Margaret’s childhood was similar to Fred Rogers’s, given his close relationship with his own mother. McFarland later remembered, with deep appreciation, that her mother had successfully remade Margaret’s childhood from one of sadness to one of “pleasure” in her mother’s company.5
But soon things took another dark turn: Not long after Margaret’s father died, she contracted rheumatic fever. It was a frightening time for the little girl, kept at home by her illness. Her mother worked hard to help young Margaret, but her daughter’s childhood was populated with the darkest fears: Would she lose her life, too? Would her mother get sick, become an invalid, and die? Would Margaret ever be able to fully recover from the effects of rheumatic fever and have a normal life?
What turned the tide for McFarland in these early, frightening years was the same thing that later helped the young Fred Rogers emerge from his
own childhood fears to become a capable and confident young man: the attention of a caring adult who focused on the child, listened, talked about fear and about life itself, and gave the child a direct connection to the adult world.6 The family doctor noticed young Margaret’s loneliness, and he helped her move ahead. In those days, doctors routinely made house calls, and he came back again and again to check up on her. When her recovery had progressed far enough that the doctor felt confident about letting Margaret go back outside, he invited her to come with him in his car as he made the rounds of house calls to his other patients.
Day after day, the doctor would pick up Margaret at home and let her ride with him in his car, talking with her the whole time about her life, and about the details of the cases of his other patients, many of whom were infants and children. Margaret would wait in the car while the doctor visited each house and then talk with him about the other children when he came back to drive to the next stop.7
Young Margaret McFarland got the benefit of the company of this thoughtful and caring man, and she got an education in what it meant for him to work with little children. “I loved him dearly,” said the grown-up Margaret years later, remarking that the doctor became a “surrogate father” to her.8
Her experiences with the family doctor helped Margaret overcome her fears about losing both of her parents. With his help, she came out of her shell to become a far more engaged child. Most importantly, her rides with him kindled the interest that would later become her life’s work: child development. Her long conversations with the kindly doctor, who explained what each of his child patients was experiencing, became the stuff of young Margaret McFarland’s imagination.
By the time Margaret was a teenager, she had decided to study child development (not medicine, interestingly) and to become a specialist in the workings of families with young children. She studied at Goucher College near Baltimore, Maryland, where she received her undergraduate degree, then went on to Columbia University in New York to get her doctorate. After graduation, Dr. McFarland spent four years in Australia, teaching young teachers how to manage kindergarten classes. But she tired of being so far away from home, and came back to join the faculty at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts.9
Meanwhile, back in Margaret’s hometown, Dr. Benjamin Spock was trying to interest the leaders of the University of Pittsburgh in starting a program for very young children that could serve the community and provide a base for the sort of research into children and families that he wanted to conduct. Spock—who was teaching at the Pitt School of Medicine as well as writing and practicing medicine—was already, arguably, the most famous pediatrician in the United States. His book about raising and caring for children, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, had been published a few years earlier and had made Dr. Spock a household name in America, and eventually, much of the rest of the world. Spock’s baby book became the second-bestselling book in history (after the Bible) and a trusted reference for millions of parents. Over the years, Benjamin Spock also courted controversy: Some leaders in the media and popular culture faulted him for being far too lenient with young children, a criticism that later appended to one of his followers, Fred Rogers. Dr. Spock, like Rogers later, encouraged young parents to realize that they themselves had all the tools to help their children, and that engaging with children deeply was more important than incessantly correcting them. A champion rower (he won an Olympic gold medal with the Yale crew in 1924), Spock also became controversial for his opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
Even in the early 1950s, Spock was influential enough to get the university to commit funds to starting his research and education center. When he got the approval, Spock located the center in a couple of houses in the Arsenal section of the city, whose name derived from the nineteenth-century arsenal that manufactured much of the munitions supply for the Union Army during the Civil War. Located in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, it was about a twenty-minute drive from the university.
Spock needed someone to run the center for him; he was too busy teaching, writing, and practicing medicine. An associate at Pitt gave him the name of Margaret McFarland, who was already establishing a reputation for depth and thoughtfulness as a scholar of early childhood education. It was just the chance McFarland needed, and she returned to Pittsburgh to become the director of the center, which took the name Arsenal Family & Children’s Center. It opened in 1953 and provided early education for Pittsburgh children for decades. It also served as the site for some of the most important research into child development in the twentieth century.
Spock intended that the Arsenal Center would provide a site for pediatric students at Pitt to study the behavior of children and their families in a very stable Eastern European ethnic community. He hoped the center would go on for decades, providing the basis for long-term longitudinal studies of child development. In fact, the center still exists, though it separated from its research base at Pitt and became a stand-alone nonprofit in 1980.
By the time Fred Rogers came to study at the Arsenal Center, it was a teeming petri dish of the most progressive thinking in the rapidly developing field of child development. Just at this point, when Rogers was evolving from the off-the-cuff zaniness of The Children’s Corner to making serious educational television, he could not have found a richer intellectual environment in which to learn about child development and to establish rigorous standards for his own work.
Like Fred Rogers later, Ben Spock tried to influence parents to treat their young children as individuals and to have the confidence to be flexible and responsive with them. Under the leadership of Spock and McFarland, the Arsenal Center attracted other cutting-edge thinkers who agreed with some of their approaches, like Erik Erikson, who came there in the 1950s to spend time working with Spock and McFarland on their research.
When he was approached by Spock, Erikson was based at the Austen Riggs Center, a private psychiatric treatment center in Stock-bridge, Massachusetts. He’d also been on the faculty at the Pitt medical school during the 1950s, and he taught at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. The 1950 publication of his book Childhood and Society established his reputation as one of the leading thinkers in the world on the topic.
Erik Erikson had studied with Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, and became one of the first psychoanalysts to work with children. He focused much of his thinking on the question of ego identity, and he is credited with being the originator of the term “identity crisis.” (Interestingly, Erikson himself struggled with identity as a young man; he was from a Jewish family but turned out to have had a Danish father who had been the lover of his Jewish mother; Erikson was teased at school both for being Jewish and for looking Nordic.)
According to Erikson’s philosophy, it was essential for a child to grow up in a healthy environment if he or she was to go through the various stages of psychological development in a normal way. Like Spock and Rogers, Erikson felt that parents, and their interaction with their children, were critical. He won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his book Gandhi’s Truth, and he was selected to deliver a Jefferson Lecture, one of the highest honors in the humanities.
As if it weren’t enough for this new center to have Spock and McFarland and Erikson, the Arsenal was also able to attract Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, another noted pediatrician and author acclaimed for his research, who wrote twenty-four books as well as a syndicated newspaper column. He is probably best known today as the author of a book and a cable television show from the 1980s that shared the same title: What Every Baby Knows.
Perhaps Brazelton’s primary impact on the field of pediatrics was his ability to get other doctors to pay more attention to the behavioral and emotional expressions of their patients. Just as Rogers later focused his television production as much on the social and emotional development of young children as he did on their cognitive growth, Dr. Brazelton paid attention to the feelings, activities, and b
ehaviors of his patients as well as to their physical conditions. An early study led by Brazelton focused on mothers and babies managing breastfeeding together; he saw their actions as a very early form of communication that was in effect a precursor to spoken language.
In Victorian times, children were viewed as rather annoying miniature adults, and the infant and toddler years were thought of as a difficult period that parent and child alike should get through as quickly as possible. Research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries revealed that young children are voracious learners, and that early childhood is a critical period in terms of the development of outlook, capacity, function, and even the physiology of the brain. The great thinkers at the Arsenal Center were focused on just how parents and teachers could best understand and approach this most-important period in a child’s life.
To some extent, Spock and the other academics at the Arsenal Center were reacting to decades of Victorian and post-Victorian child-rearing practices that emphasized keeping children in their place. It was a time memorialized by the saying: “Children are best seen, not heard.” The Arsenal Center experts knew that such thinking could lead parents to miss great opportunities to engage their young children and help them learn.