Don Chance, a finance professor at Louisiana
State University,
says it dawned on him last spring. The semester was ending, and as usual,
students were making a pilgrimage to his office, asking for the extra points
needed to lift their grades to A’s.
“They felt so entitled,” he recalls, “and it
just hit me. We can blame Mr. Rogers.”
Fred Rogers, the late TV icon, told several generations of
children that they were “special” just for being whoever they were.
He meant well, and he was a sterling role model in many ways. But what often
got lost in his self-esteem-building patter was the idea that being special
comes from working hard and having high expectations for yourself.
Now Mr. Rogers, like Dr. Spock before him, has been targeted
for re-evaluation. And he’s not the only one. As educators and researchers
struggle to define the new parameters of parenting, circa 2007, some are
revisiting the language of child ego-boosting. What are the downsides of
telling kids they’re special? Is it a mistake to have children call us by our
first names? When we focus all conversations on our children’s lives, are we
denying them the insights found when adults talk about adult things?
Some are calling for a recalibration of the mind-sets and
catch-phrases that have taken hold in recent decades. Among the expressions now
being challenged:
“You’re special.” On the Yahoo Answers Web site, a
discussion thread about Mr. Rogers begins with this posting: “Mr. Rogers
spent years telling little creeps that he liked them just the way they were. He
should have been telling them there was a lot of room for improvement. … Nice
as he was, and as good as his intentions may have been, he did a
disservice.”
