That is Respect

The four-year-old boy was in full on tantrum. He had lost his temper with another child, punching him in the neck, then picked up a wooden block as if to throw it at him. I grabbed his wrist, then with the other hand took the block from his grasp. He fought against me, trying to get away, yelling, crying, outraged. There were other children nearby, not to mention furniture and other objects on which he could potentially hurt himself. I took hold of his other arm, holding both wrists firmly.

He was fighting against me as I gently pulled him away from the crowd, toward a corner of the room where I sat on a bench, drawing him into me, my arms and legs encircling him. He continued to lash about. My arm would show a bruise for a few days. 

I said, "I don't like it when you hit me." 

I said, "My job is to keep people safe and when you hit people it's not safe." 

I said, "I can't let you hurt people."

This is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of our job: to keep the children safe. And that is what I was doing.

He called me "stupid." He spit. He continued to fight against my arms. I didn't take any of it personally. I said, "I can't let you go until I know you won't hit other people."

To his credit, he was honest, "I will hit them."

"Then I'll hold you," I said, "until you're ready to not hit them.

He continued to wrestle against me, but I could feel in my arms and in my chest that his full-body tension was beginning to ebb, so I loosened my grip slightly. He began to talk more coherently as he threw his body against mine, explaining himself, telling me what had happened. I said, "That would make me mad too."

Before long, I was holding my arms in a loose circle, his body between my legs. If he had wanted to, he could have easily ducked away, but instead he rolled around in my arms, still crying, still telling me what he wanted to tell me. 

I asked, "If I let you go will you hurt other people?" He said, "Yes," so we stayed there.

When another child came up to ask me a question, his body tensed once more as he shouted, "I need Teacher Tom now! You can have him later!"

Soon he was just leaning up against me, between my legs, my arms around his shoulders, the last of spasms of whimpering faded. I wasn't holding him at all any more. He said, "I'm ready for you to let me go now. I won't hurt anybody."

There are a lot of adult who would tell me I did it all wrong, that what this boy needed was to be taught a little respect.

All too often, adult people talking about young children use the word "respect" or "disrespect" when what they mean is "obey" or "disobey." There are even those who assert, against all evidence, that parents teach respect through punishment, even through hitting children in the barbaric practice of spanking. What they are teaching is fear. What they are teaching is that the powerful have the right to abuse and bully those over whom they have power so long as they mitigate it with the caveat, "for their own good."

I've known far too many adults who claim to respect children, but who wield their physical, intellectual, social, and cultural power over them like a cudgel.

"I'm the adult!" they insist, as if that's a valid argument. 

None of this has anything to do with respect. Indeed, exerting power over another person is the height of disrespect. 

Becoming a play-based educator begins and ends with respecting young children and that is where it began for me with this boy.

Respect means that we know that this person before us, no matter how small, is a fully formed human being. Indeed, respect for young children, or anyone for that matter, is the opposite of having the right of power over others: respect demands that we assume a slew of obligations and responsibilities toward them. It's not a tit-for-tat transaction. They owe us no respect in return. But rather, if we are to be respected by our children, we must earn it. And the only way to earn respect from our children is by first respecting them. 

There is no love without respect. As bell hooks writes in her book All About Love, "Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust" (italics are mine). Any relationship that does not include respect is not one of love, but rather, one of power.

And power corrupts, a cliché that is borne out time and again through research.

"One of the effects of power," writes Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind, "is that it makes you see others in a negative light. If you're powerful you're more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do." Sounds a lot like how our schools operate, doesn't it? It might even corrupt us so much that we feel that we have the right to hit them . . . for their own good.

Play-based education only works when the adults respect the children. It means knowing that their needs, desires, and opinions stand on an equal footing with our own. It doesn't mean that we let them do whatever they want. Those obligations and responsibilities require us to, at minimum, keep them and others safe. We say, "I can't let you do that," then proceed to not let them do it, not because we say so, not because we are the adult, but because we are honoring our responsibility to keep them safe. 

There are likewise times when our responsibilities require us to keep them on schedule, maintain a certain level of hygiene, or otherwise do things they don't want to do, but that doesn't mean we must command them in the fashion of "my way or the highway." It means that we are obliged to explain ourselves, to be transparent about our responsibilities, and to sympathize with their feelings about it.

We say, "I know you don't want to." 

We say, "I don't want to either." 

We say, "I can't let you." 

If it's not negotiable, we don't negotiate. 

And sometimes that means that we take their hands or pick them up and carry them, crying, even yelling. When this happens, no one is showing anyone disrespect: one person is fulfilling their responsibility, while the other is raging at the fates. We might even tell them, "I feel the same way."

It's a nuance many adults don't get. They hear tantrums as rebellion and it is rebellion if it's a reaction to an abuse of power. That is, after all, what rebellion always is. When respect is present, however, when love is present, we can see their tears as the most human thing in the world. There is nothing to rebel against. They simply aren't getting what they want, not because the powerful are keeping it from them, but because life is imperfect. And sometimes that makes us cry. When respect is present, the adult is then there, not as a punitive force, but rather as a loving support, a fellow traveler in disappointment. And to keep everyone safe.

Every play-based educator has experienced that moment when a child in tantrum, relaxes into our shoulder, taking comfort from us even as, only moments before, it might have looked to outsiders that they were fighting against us. Only now are we ready to begin to make things right again.

That is respect.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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