What Mr. Rogers Could Have Taught Michael Jackson

And wasn't that what Fred Rogers was trying to teach us: that emotionally unhealthy children become emotionally unhealthy adults? For more than 30 years, these were the messages of PBS's "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood": Respect your children, nurture their self-esteem, listen to their fears and concerns, play with them. "We all long to be lovable and capable of loving," Rogers told a CNN interviewer in 1999, and that applies to Mr. Jackson, too. Watching "Living With Michael Jackson," you didn't have to be a therapist to understand that Mr. Jackson's perceived eccentricities — his fetishization of childhood, his fascination with toys and theme parks, his magical single fatherhood — are self-medicating attempts to give himself the boyhood he never had.
[more]