Waiting for Mister Rogers: Teaching with Attachment, Attunement, and Intention

By Wysteria Edwards, BA, Ed.M

• Defines attachment styles and normalizes insecure attachments 
• Outlines how Mister Rogers created a safe and secure environment for his viewers—through intentional practices 
• Describes how adversity can be traced back to broken attachments
• Depicts how teachers can be influenced and triggered by their unhealed traumas, as well as those of their students
• Demonstrates how to re-wire the brain (neuroplasticity) and move toward secure attachment through consistent interactions and strategies
• Explains how attachment repair is the answer for extreme behavioral challenges and children with ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)
• Encourages empathy and understanding for teachers who seek to serve and teach the children in their care
• Offers healing from telling stories in safe places
• Connects with fans and watchers of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood
• Appeals to readers of Karyn Purvis’ The Connected Child, Peter A. Levine’s Trauma Through a Child's Eyes, Mona Delahooke’s Beyond Behaviors and Diane Poole Heller’s The Power of Attachment

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781636981048

Wysteria Edwards, BA, Ed.M

Wysteria Edwards BA, Ed.M, is an award-winning author, educator, podcaster, playwright, and influencer who resides in Washington state. As an educator with 20+ years of experience (K-12), she began applying attachment repair in her Kindergarten classroom for children suffering from ACEs and broken connections. Wysteria is the founder of Simple and Deep, a company dedicated to helping women embrace their stories, heal broken attachments, and live with intention. For more information about Wysteria or to download resources for this book and transformation, visit her website: wysteriaedwards.com.

Book preview

Part One:

Where Are You, Mister Rogers?

Lynn Johnson Collection

A collection of stick puppets of the Neighborhood made by the author for the classroom. Used with permission.

Chapter 1:

Returning to the Neighborhood

It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.

—Fred Rogers

I don’t ride a trolley to get here. I pull my chair to the middle of the room and face the screen. The overhead lights are dimmed, with only the soft glow of the fish tank illuminating the calm-down area. When I had put the tank together, the girl in the pet store looked at the photo on my phone and said, I think my mom liked that guy. That guy being Mister Rogers. It was important to me to replicate his fish tank to add more comfort to my classroom. Since then, it’s become a space where my autistic student sits for breaks and others soothe their sadness.

Watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with my kindergarten students is a nonnegotiable part of our day. It’s garnished miracles and changed my life. As they eat their Ritz crackers, I take a deep breath. Breathing deeply keeps us present and grounded in the moment. Every day, I pull up a chair to watch as a gift to myself and my students, and I invite in anything that love wants to teach me.

Where some teachers would see thirty minutes as a break to prepare the next activity, I’m making an intentional choice to sit down. To stop. It comes from a place deep inside me that misses a time when the world wasn’t as violent, fastpaced, sophisticated, and insecure. Do you remember?

There was a time when people understood the power of a written letter and an intentional conversation, when families sat down and talked at the dinner table. I miss being a little girl. I miss my grandma, who made me feel safe as she snuggled up to read to me and stroke my hair. I knew I was the only one who mattered at that moment in her eyes and presence. In her love, I wasn’t afraid but safe and warm. She represented a pause in my life, my safe place.

Returning to the Neighborhood is about coming home to the children we once were. In a place where time stands still, we watch a kind man in a cardigan sweater. And it’s my return to the real me I’d lost along the way of trying to understand self-worth, trust, and security.

Perhaps we abandoned ourselves long ago due to being left alone with all that we didn’t understand. I’ve learned so many things I didn’t know I didn’t know. Learning and discovering the truth will set us free. The Neighborhood is where I come back, with my sweet Baby Girl inside, and sit with all my stories of harm and heartache. It’s time to be intentional. It’s time to pause, focus our attention, and grow in love.

Shea Tuttle, the author of Exactly as You Are, writes:

Over the years, I grew out of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I forgot the storylines and many of the songs. But I remembered the man, and I remembered how he and his program made me feel: completely seen, completely loved. I cannot recall the precise origin of my affection for Mister Rogers, and I cannot quite explain its intensity. I just know that he is indescribably special to me; I feel as if I have always known him like he was part of my becoming. It is not simple nostalgia, fleeting, and saccharine. It is deeper than nostalgia. It is formation. It is Love.¹⁶

Mister Rogers climbed into our implicit memories as children, becoming a secure base, a home. When I see Mister Rogers’ face, I feel instant relief, a friend commented on my social media post. People would come up to Fred Rogers on the street when they recognized his face and say, Thank you for my childhood. He counted it an honor to go through life with the face that meant such a great deal to many people. We all crave relief from emotional heavy lifting, a place or person that feels like home. We don’t have to recall our affection for Mister Rogers; he’s simply there. He’s tucked away in our childhood schema, woven into the tapestries of our stories. He told us the truth ever so long ago, and we believed it. Memories unconscious and unintentional on our part, but always deeply intentional on his. In Mister Rogers’ love, we are unique, valuable, capable, celebrated, received, and accepted. But some children need that same relief when they see your face and mine. What do they feel when they see you in their mind’s eye or each morning entering the classroom? It’s a humbling but important question.

I bring my students to his love every day because it fosters healthy attachment and convinces them that good people exist in this world. I want them to experience friendship, grace, and kindness and to talk about the big feelings in their hearts. Every song was written by a man dedicated to doing what was right, regardless of the world’s understanding or acceptance. People tried, without success, to get the man in the cardigan to update things, catch up with the times, and refresh the show. Yet gritty, unrelenting love is intentional and dedicated. His wife, Joanne Rogers, writes:

Even when the world around him was changing, becoming fastpaced and materialistic, even hectic and violent, at times, even when he seemed to be going against the current and some were urging him to pick up the pace of his program, Fred was determined to stay the course. Anyone who was close to him knew about his steel backbone. A lot of people might be surprised to think of him that way, but he was strong-willed and determined. The mentors he trusted supported his decision to continue on what he knew was the right path to be himself.¹⁷

You must know what you stand for and where you will plant your feet. Are there any nonnegotiables for you regarding the children you love and lead? Watching the Neighborhood became mine when I got tired of watching children emotionally bleeding out in front of me. I had a choice to make, and you do too. What will we do? Continue gathering the latest information, the repackaged, relabeled, complex, and shallow interpretations of old wounds? Radical love unnerves the best scientists, pragmatists, and analytics who crave data and assurances. How do you measure hope, love, peace, and kindness? We can say we are loving children, but what does love look like? What does it sound like?

As author and activist Bell Hooks cautions, Remember, care is a dimension of love, but simply giving care does not mean we are loving. Just doing the job of teaching doesn’t change lives—but the intentional, simple, and deep commitment to the wellness of the human heart and spirit does. And it begins with yourself. Love yourself first, because your thoughts lead to your emotions and actions. In a moment of desperation to help a child, I reached out for something in the Neighborhood that became a lifeline for myself too.

It all makes sense. The home we’re searching for—the belonging—is within us. Home is the combination of all that we know is true and right. Home is where our authentic selves live. Brené Brown defines belonging this way: True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.¹⁸

We access our inner home, just like opening the door to Mister Rogers’ TV house, by stepping inside and studying our story. And, yes, it will often feel like the wilderness. But if we don’t remember, the price is great. We won’t reach children emotionally or heal broken attachments.

When Fred Rogers said he liked us exactly as you are, he meant the whole of each of us. How we look and all that we feel. Honest love. Yes, even the dirty, mangled, uncertain, delightful, successful, broken, and abused parts. The all of us. Through his intentional choices, that was the gift he left, and we can use it as a model for loving children: simple and deep love.

****

So, I click play, sit down in my chair, and wait. As the familiar melody begins, Mister Rogers enters through the wooden door smiling, showing up again to help me. My privilege is facilitating healing in broken places and hearts, with him as a guide and model.

My students surround me as they finish their snacks. Each one gets as close to me as they can. Instantly, they become more gentle, quiet, and engaged. It is my daily glimpse of glory.

Hi, neighbor, he says to the camera.

Hi, Mister Rogers! they eagerly greet him.

When we first began this journey with him, they preferred time with Mister Rogers over the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. I assumed the puppets and costumes were too simple for them as they squirmed and conversed among themselves more. But when Mister Rogers came back on the screen, they were frozen, captivated by connection and intention. They just wanted to be near him. He looked directly into the camera as if he could truly see them, authentic and vulnerable. Author Shea Tuttle recalls, Mister Rogers would summon Trolley, the cheerful red streetcar who guided the transition into Make-Believe, and I from my corner of the couch would let out a sigh—I preferred the segments of the show in Mister Rogers’ company to the interlude in Make-Believe—but only a small sigh, because I knew that, in just a few minutes, Trolley would faithfully return me to that living room and Mister Rogers.¹⁹

I bring my students to the Neighborhood because it’s emotionally safe. It’s the best I can give when the little girl inside me is still healing, too, and the world gets messier and fast-paced. We grow together every time. The energy in the room shifts, and they are free of all the things that complicate a modern child’s world. (It’s funny how, as a child, I longed to be grown-up, and now all I want is to go back to a simpler time when I believed in puppets and automated trolleys.)

My students watch in awe as Mister Rogers makes music with old soda bottles, blowing over the top of the water. They’re transfixed by the food coloring mixing in the water; they barely move as blue drops twist and turn inside. Bob Trow creates a pulley to open the door in a workshop, and we watch as yellow wax is made into colored crayons.

But it only takes a day or two before the Neighborhood of Make-Believe holds their attention, generating questions and wonderment. They don’t notice the outdated clothes or the simplicity of the puppets. Does that surprise you? former Neighborhood director Paul Lally asks when I interview him for my podcast in November of 2020. It has always worked, and it still does. That’s the beauty of it, Wystie.²⁰

When Daniel Striped Tiger sings about being forgotten by Lady Aberlin, my student Julian, whose mother recently had a baby, begins to cry, and we comfort him. My class recognized that his new role had left him feeling isolated. Within the first month of viewing the program, parents began to communicate that their children asked to watch Mister Rogers at home instead of meaningless cartoons and YouTube videos. The shift was quick and purposeful, and it filtered into every facet of our learning.

I don’t need a curriculum for this or a set of questions for debriefing. I let Fred do what he did best and trust it.

As I shared my findings with my mentor, she challenged me to look for God and love within every episode. What did God want to tell me? What was love needing to say to my students? Love would change everything if I remained open. But there was a condition: I wasn’t to multitask but should instead model for my students, watching with wonder and attunement. Accepting the challenge, I was amazed and delighted by the show’s most intricate connections to my curriculum, to recent conflicts on the playground or in the classroom, and to my own healing. Questions that only moments before had never been spoken aloud were answered by Fred Rogers.

****

It’s what is going on inside a person that matters, he says, and I’m a three-year-old again.

Where are you, Mister Rogers? I’m waiting for you, right here in this little chair. You said you’d be back again tomorrow and willing to spend time with me. Please, look me in the eyes and help me understand that I still matter in this crazy, mixed-up world, the child inside me pleads.

Help me, Mister Rogers, to be love to children who are emotionally bleeding out in front of me! the teacher in me cries. The needs are too great, and I’m still small in so many ways.

Can I just sit here and be quiet with you, Mister Rogers? the little girl inside me asks.

An equal mix of emotions has emerged on this journey back to the Neighborhood. Mister Rogers and I have become partners in preserving childhood. The world vies to squelch the time between birth and consumer, and it’s like turning backward in a strong river and choosing to dam the onslaught of pressures heading my students’ way. I believe there needs to be more time for them to breathe easy, to be children longer, to wonder and dream.

****

We often don’t realize when life is rewriting our story. Each day is part of a more significant journey we can’t see until we look back in hindsight. You might call it the universe, but I call it God, love. As I struggled to find my way back over the bridge to secure attachment, it was as if I was healing backward, like the rings of an onion. Healing included learning how to be present with all the feelings in my body, tolerating the sensations, and reacting with compassion instead of judgment. I needed tender nurturing and attunement. My insecure attachment left me with unresolved longing, yearning, and a feeling I could never have what I wanted. I often thought about how I didn’t deserve the love of my husband and children. They were too good or too right for me. Somehow, having Matthew and the boys, I’d tricked the world and slid by with the best. Hypervigilant to the possibility of shattering and loss, my brain wasn’t used to peace and goodness. It was the duality of keeping what I had and wondering if there was something I’d missed along the way. I can only compare it to the feelings of unrequited love. Had I gone down the right path and made all the correct choices? Such thinking kept me in constant panic and anxiety with profound moments of depression and despair. The problem with identifying with deprivation is that when love truly presents itself, we may find ourselves rejecting it because it feels unfamiliar and disorienting.²¹

Healing from broken connection requires work, work that’s intentional and sometimes uncomfortable. Let me share with you a few areas and concepts I worked hard to explore and embrace.

Discovering my authentic self. Who was I? What mattered to me? What did I stand for and want out of this life?

Integrating my experiences. What stories had made me who I am, and how did I make sense of them? Where was I holding on to narratives that weren’t my own? In the case of ambivalent attachment, I had enmeshed with my mother, and it was as if we were braided into the same story. I didn’t know where I started or where she ended. Part of healing was unwinding my own identity (autonomy) and recognizing that I had integrated her stories of abuse and neglect, swallowing them deep into my soul. My counselor frequently said, That’s your mother’s memory, not yours. This was one of the most painful processes of my healing, as it forced me to emotionally emancipate myself from my mother, the person I had clung to my entire life. The separation was necessary, but it broke her heart. Without her realizing, I’d been appointed her emotional caretaker, and I needed to connect to my sense of self and meet my own needs. A child who takes care of a parent often forges a lifelong pattern of overextension and creates a blueprint for habitually feeling overwhelmed.²² This is where it was extremely helpful for me to have a wise and attuned counselor who reminded me that, one day, only wholeness and freedom would be left.

Grounding into each present moment. I learned how to honor myself while being in the presence of others. This is a big step if we’re used to being swallowed by emotions, experiences, or needs. Often in anxious attachment, we lose ourselves . . . due to [the] learned habit of over-focusing on others for external regulation.²³ I was tremendously skilled at reading a room with this hyperfocus but susceptible to falling victim to the circumstances and feelings of others. This knowledge blew my mind when I realized that my inability to self-regulate was why I couldn’t help my son Jonathan when he was dysregulated. I didn’t have this healthily wired into my