Gen X was the first generation to fully grow up in a 'Mister Rogers' America, and it’s reasonable to say that they were more impacted by his program than any other. chaneyj writes
Fred Rogers in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Photo: Bettman/Bettmann Archive In his decades as a television host and national child-comforter-in-chief, the late Fred Rogers became synonymous with kindness, hope, and compassion.
Generation X was hardly the only generation influenced by Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The show made its national public-television debut in 1968, when the youngest baby-boomers were roughly 4 years old, and it remained on the air until August 31, 2001, a little more than a week before 9/11, a point when millennials had largely aged out of the Neighborhood and Gen-Zers were only beginning to be exposed to it. Fred Rogers had an effect on members of multiple age groups.
Mister Rogers also famously taught children that they were special, a fact that, several years ago, got twisted in a Wall Street Journal column and a Fox News segment into a way to explain why millennials are so entitled. One of the Fox hosts even referred to Mister Rogers as an “evil, evil man,” which should qualify as an FCC violation. It was all wrong for a number of reasons, but a chief one is that it misunderstood what Fred Rogers meant when he told kids they were special.
But more than previous generations, Xers were raised in an increasingly culturally and ethnically diverse America and a good number of us embraced that intermingling, in our friendships and in our pop-cultural preferences. This is even more true for millennials and Generation Z. Maybe we were conditioned to accept other people for who they were and to see the beauty in them, in at least a small way, by Fred Rogers, who, despite his conservative cardigans, was an extremely progressive man.
That obsession with selling out stems from a core Gen-X value: authenticity. Most people would say they value honesty and forthrightness, but I think Xers clung extra-hard to it, even as kids, perhaps because our overexposure to the phoniness of family sitcoms and other TV fibbery made us hyperaware of when we were being lied to.
Which brings me to my final point: that maybe we should look to the example set by Mister Rogers more often while navigating our often-heated conversations about generation gaps. If you’ve taken a passing glance at any social-media feed recently, you’ve probably noticed that intergenerational warfare has gotten more intense. “OK boomer” bombs are dropped right and left. Millennials and their parents are becoming both sides of that Spider-Man meme.
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