Hey, welcome back to the Personality Hacker Podcast. My name is Joe Mark Witt.

And I'm Antonia Dodge. A few years ago, my cousin told me something, my guy cousin told me that I don't know how to talk to kids.

And I was really offended by this. I was like, what are you talking about on how to talk to kids?

Work with kids most of my life. I grew up in my parents youth ministry and I was I

was really at first offended by this concept that I but I really thought about it for a

while and the reason he said it to me is often when I'm around children I talk to them like they're adults

I don't necessarily do and I kind of have an ethic around not going oh we do you're talking like to kids, like, even if it's like a two-year-old.

I'd like, hey, what's up man? You're like, give me a fist bump, whatever. I'll just like talk directly to the child or the

toddler in whatever way. And sometimes I will, you know, I'm like, if I'm talking to a kid, I'm not like censoring my speech to be very careful to not be maybe with speech that could be seen from a child's perspective as harsh. I'm not trying to be mean to kids, but I, you know, I just was like, I wasn't being careful.

But then I remember about six months after my cousin told me this, this was many years ago, I watched the replay of Mr Rogers who was sitting back in I

think it was the 1970s or 80s in Congress in the United States maybe the 1960s actually

late 60s when he was trying to push for funding for

public television and he was basically appealing to the government to say hey this is

important for people in the world like public television is important and they were like

we're gonna cut budget funding for this and he went on to explain how important it was

if you've never seen this video it's an incredible video this is a really captivating

evocative video for me. And as I watched it, I remember by the end of it I was crying.

I was actually in tears.

And some of the government people there were moved emotionally.

And when Mr. Rogers said something about children,

he talked about how children don't need

television programming with guns or violence, I think he even used the term bopping people on the head.

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