Yep, condescending indeed.

The interesting thing is my parents and their colleagues have been college professors since the mid and late 50s. Long before Mr. Rogers was shown to children, American college students were trying to wheedle higher grades out of their professors. And they're not the only ones, either. The writer of that article might not have had Asian-American wheedlers, but in my university and in the universities where my parents taught, those were very common requests from Asian-American and Middle-Eastern students, too. The expectations of those students and their cultures was so high. The Asian-Americans more frequently simply made the top grades and didn't need to wheedle because they worked so hard and earned those grades. But when they didn't quite make the top marks, they most definitely asked for ways to make their grades higher. One of my dad's favorite lines was, "Dr. Anderson, you have to give me an A because I simply have to have an A in this course."

So Mr. Rogers isn't responsible for that trend. That author also apparently wasn't familiar with Dr. Spock, who espoused firm limits and discipline and not giving in to children's every wish. The pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton is regarded much more as the children's expert/book author who takes a child-coddling approach, not Spock.