Updated edition featuring a new foreword by David "Mr. McFeely" Newell.

The pieces in this volume address the enduring influence and importance of Fred Roger's work in children's television. The contributors, representing a wide range of disciplines--art, psychology, medicine, social criticism, theology, music, and communications--include David Bianculli, Lynette Friedrick Cofer, Nancy E. Curry, Ellen Galinsky, Geroge Gerbner, William Guy, Lynn Johnson, Jeanne Marie Laskas, Susan Linn, Mary Rawson, Mark Shelton, Reoderick Townley, Paula Lawrence Wehmiller, and Eugenia Zukerman interviewing Yo-Yo Ma.

Born in 1928 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Fred Rogers began his television career in 1951 at NBC. In 1954, he became program director for the newly founded WQED-TV in Pittsburgh, the first community-supported television station in the United States. From 1954 to 1961, Rogers and Josie Carey produced and performed in WQED's The Children's Corner, which became part of the the Saturday morning lineup on NBC in 1955 and 1956.

It was after Fred Rogers was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963, with a special charge of serving children and their families through television, that he developed what became the award-winning PBS series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.  

Winner, 2020 NCA Top Single-Author Book of the Year Award

Fred Rogers is an American cultural and media icon, whose children’s television program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, ran for more than thirty years (1967-2001) on the Public Broadcasting System. In this highly original book, communication scholar Alexandra C. Klarén shows how Rogers captured the moral, social, and emotional imaginations of multiple generations of Americans. She explores the nuanced complexity of the thought behind the man and the program, the dialogical integration of his various influences, and the intentional ethic of care behind the creation of a program that spoke to the affective, cultural, and educational needs of children (and adults) during a period of cultural and political upheaval. Richly informed by newly available archival materials, On Becoming Neighbors chronicles the evolution of Rogers’ thought on television, children, pedagogy, and the family through a rhetorical, cultural, and ethical lens. Klarén probes how Rogers creates the conditions for dialogue in which participants explore possibilities and questions relating to the social and material world.