We could all use a little dose of Mr Rogers

A couple of headlines intersected this week. First of all was the horrible school shooting in Florida. That put me in a mind to rerun my “horrible headline” post from a year ago when some similarly terrible event happened.  But in a smaller headline was the reminder that Mr. Rogers aired his show 50 years ago. In my post about talking to our children about scary situations, I actually quote Mr. Rogers. He shared a lesson that he learned from his own mother, “look for the helpers”. Those might be a person in uniform, or another parent with children. That remains great advice and is one of his more well known pearls of wisdom.

Since I have some extra time on my one hand this week, I decided to give my own shout out to Mr Rogers. Most of you may not know this, but I was fortunate enough to interact with him several times while I was working at my first job as a nurse at The Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. Mr Rogers routinely visited my little patients there. He also created several movies there that we would use for patient education. He was the real deal. There was nothing fake about that man. A generation of children grew up better people because of the lessons he taught. Here are some of my favorite pieces of Mr Roger's wisdom:

• "There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind."

• “There is only one thing evil cannot stand, and that is forgiveness.'"

• "There's a part of all of us that longs to know that even what's weakest about us can ultimately count for something good." It is okay not to be perfect!

• “Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing.”

• Accept people as they are

• Look and listen carefully

 

• “We all have feelings.” Talking and acknowledging them is the first step towards finding ways to deal with them that don’t hurt anyone

• Anything that's human is mention-able, and anything that's mention-able can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we're not alone.

• Wonder about things

• “You can’t go down the drain in the bathtub” Don’t be shy about sharing things that might be scary

• “Be yourself.” It is not how you look, what you wear or what toys you have that make you special

• What can you grow in the garden of your mind? Use your imagination.

• You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.

• One of the most important things a person can learn to do is to make something out of whatever he or she happens to have at the moment.

Mr. Rogers was a gift to generations of kids but I wonder if any of my patients know who he is? I believe that Daniel Tiger is making sure that the whisper of his gentle message lives on!