Loving And Being Loved While Doing Meaningful Things, Together

Low pay is a major downside of being an early childhood educator. In most places in the US, our average pay barely rises above the poverty level. Low prestige is likewise a problem, one that goes hand-in-hand with low pay, but is also the result of ours being a profession that is increasingly made up of young women of color, a trifecta of economic marginalization. Oh sure, when we tell people what we do for a living, they often insist that we're saints doing the "most important work," but polls show that very few of those people would encourage their own child to pursue a career in the early years. The only reason I was able to remain in the classroom for as long as I did was that my wife had a good income.

Despite it all, the job has its compensations, not the least of which is the children themselves. Most of us, most of the time, love the children, and we know that we're making a difference in their lives. And we also know that the children love us back. No matter what horrible things were going on in my life, no matter what challenges our school was facing, no matter what candidate or ballot initiate was being debated in the political realm, as long as I was down on my knees with the children, the world was good. That's the power of loving, being loved, and knowing that we are spending our time on the planet making a real, tangible difference.

I used to joke that at any given moment, my best friends were five-years-old. These were the children who had been with me for three years. By the time they were five, they had been coming to Woodland Park for over half their lives. We had history together and told inside jokes. Indeed, whenever we came together it was within the context of a community we had built together, with its distinct culture founded upon the agreements we made with one another, on our individual personalities and relationships. We were relaxed with one another, a product of having been through crap together, and knew by now that we would always come out on the other side, together. If that isn't the stuff of genuine friendship, I don't know what is.

Maybe the best part of our profession is that it's very hard to feel lonely.

I've been thinking a lot lately about loneliness. Survey's find that some 60 percent of Americans report that they feel lonely on a regular basis. The pandemic didn't help, of course, but loneliness was already a problem, one that's been on the rise since the 1970's (so we can't lay the blame fully on the internet), and it continues to be such a significant problem that many experts, including US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, are calling loneliness a health crisis. 

According to Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist and psychology professor at Yale University:

(I)ndividuals who report feeling lonely are more likely to experience things like dementia, heart disease, stroke. It actually affects longevity. Meaning that people who self-report feeling lonely are even more likely to die than those that aren't . . . feel(ing) lonely is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of its impact on our health and our well-being.

Social neuroscientist John T. Cacioppo claims that loneliness also negatively affects our thinking abilities, willpower, and immune systems.

Our attempts to solve loneliness through technology has so far been a total bust. Social media, with its promise to connect people, seems to do the opposite, making individuals feel even more lonely than before, which may be why the problem of loneliness if even more pronounced among young adults. Attempts of create artificial intelligence companions will likely fail for the same reason. Liking a photo of a party is not the same as having been there; talking to a machine, even if it says all the right things, will never be the kind of two-way street that humans seem to need.

It's a cliché to say we're "social animals," but we are. Even those of us who identify as introverts need regular doses of human interaction in order to be fully healthy, happy humans. And while technology may be the ongoing process of attempting to solve problems that humans have so far failed to solve, it cannot, at least in the short run, ever hope to alleviate the sense of isolation, social rejection, and lack of connection that characterizes loneliness. 

The pop psychologists are simply urging us to "get off social media," and that certainly may be part of it, but there is more than that at work in making so many of us feel lonely. It's not an accident that our national rise in loneliness has coincided with a rise in the number of hours per week we spend with our noses at the grindstone. It's not irrelevant that our commute times are eating up more and more of our time on the planet. It's not a coincidence that the decline in the number of "third places" like bowling alleys and movie theaters, and roller rinks, other community gathering places, has coincided with the increase in feelings of loneliness. And I can't help but believe that the era of go-go, rah-rah, every-man-for-himself capitalism that was ushered in during the early 1980's is at least party responsible for making view our fellow humans competitors in some sort of bizarre race to . . . where?

When I think of playing with my best friends, our days were spent largely in cooperation. Sure there were moments of rivalry or conflict over limited resources, but our solutions, as they usually are amongst friends always involved more cooperation. As the late, great Utah Phillips sang, "I will not obey, but I'm always read to agree." As I think of what we did together, I see us learning together, as a community, in stark contrast to the hyper-individualistic don't-peek-at-your-neighbor's-work culture of standard schools where competition over test scores and grades drives everything.

We like to speculate about what gives our species its "advantages." People say it's the opposable thumb or language or relatively larger brains. But our real strength as a species is our ability to work together. Anthropologists tell us that Neanderthals humans were actually individually more "intelligent" than us smaller, weaker Homo sapiens, yet we thrived because of our unprecedented ability to cooperate. We did not evolve with the larger muscles, sharper teeth, greater speed, and ferocity of all the other so-called apex predators; we didn't do it through being individually brilliant; no, everything that makes our species special has come through working together. Feeling lonely can only be fixed through connecting with other humans, not just to chat, but actually do things together, to cooperate, and to create meaning.

To be a play-based preschool teacher might mean living humbly, but it also means that we need never feel lonely because we can spend our days loving and be loved while doing meaningful things, together. That is, in the end, the only cure for loneliness. 

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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