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| 'Whosoever holds the hammer, if he be worthy...' |
I once interviewed children’s
television host Fred Rogers about superheroes, an issue that concerned him. He
had once taken his TV audience onto the set of The Incredible Hulk to explain that Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno
were really two different people, that it’s all just make-believe.
Mr. Rogers said superheroes are
natural for children. “The first superheroes, of course, are the parents
themselves,” he said. “There is a very natural stage in the development of the
human personality in which we believe that we ourselves are omnipotent, and
that our parents are omnipotent, and that we’re able to do anything. But we
have to help children gently along
the way to realize that nobody is omnipotent, and neither are the heroes on
television.”
I asked him why he stressed
“gently.”
“Because even though children would love to think that they could take
on the world and win, it can also be very frightening to they to think that they are omnipotent — and that what they
think will, indeed, happen.
“One of the things that our Hulk
program came from was reading about kids who were killing themselves playing
superheroes, and also knowing how widespread superhero play is among children.
It’s important for adults to know how blurred the lines are between reality and
fantasy in young children’s minds.”
I asked why he thought children
find superheroes so attractive.
“Children are small. There are all
kinds of powerful things in their environment over which they feel they have
control. When they get angry, they often project that anger onto people and
things around them, expecting them to have the same intensity of feeling. So in
order to overcome the fear which results from being little in a big, scary
world, children often pretend that they have superhuman powers — powers even
greater than the big people and things around them. Seeing superheroes on
television and in comic books feeds that ‘personal pretend.’ In the face of
very difficult circumstances, everybody wishes once in a while that he or she
had superhuman ways of dealing with difficulty.
“As usual, we’re not condemning
fantasy. It’s often the basis for resolution and invention. What we’re doing is
helping children to understand that human beings can pretend about being
super-strong, super-big, super-fast, etc. but that it’s their real selves which
do all the important things in the world. It’s essential for their play to be
safe so they can grow and develop into what’s really super about each one of
them.”
Beyond lifting Thor’s hammer, Fred
Rogers also achieved that other ultimate proof of goodness. He’s been attacked
by Fox News.
