The Magic Word

When I was a boy the word "please" was said to be the magic word, and I suppose it was when we were performing for adults in order to get something we wanted, but "let's" is the word with real magic in it. "Let's" is, of course, really two words that we speak as one, meaning "let us." It's not a command nor a question, but rather an invitation and in the mouths of children it's most often used as an invitation to play.

"Let's play trains."

"Let's be princesses."

"Let's pretend we're pirates and I fall off the boat into the water and you have to rescue me." Without the word "let's" cooperative dramatic play would hardly be possible.

It's not so common in our 2's class, but by the time the children are 4 and 5 you hear it a lot as they play together, often at the beginning of every sentence.

And that would be enough, if this magic word could do only this, but it's a real magic word. You can use it for almost anything you need to do with the other people.

"Let's take turns."

"Let's make a rule."

"Let's try using a rock to open it."

Of course, there's always a dark side to every kind of magic, a way to misuse it.

"Let's take all the balls."

"Let's keep the girls out."

"Let's pretend we're pirates who push everybody else into the water."

But even so, even when we use it to experiment with the misuse of our collective power, there's no denying it's a magic word, one that brings us together, that creates room for other people, that makes our play better and our lives bigger. "Let's" is always an invitation, one that contains all of the open-ended possibilities of human beings together.

I don't worry about children who've learned the power of "Let's . . ."

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! In these first three episodes of Teacher Tom's Podcast, I talk with director of Defending the Early Years Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and founder of Free Range Kids Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Beautiful Moments

Let’s take a moment to think about our own childhoods.

I want you to recall a beautiful moment. A time when you were young. Go back as far as you can. Most people, they tell us, don’t have many memories from before they were six-years-old, but maybe you’re one of the lucky ones. Spend a little time with that memory.

Where were you?

Who, if anyone, was with you?

What were you doing?

What were you feeling?

The memory that comes up for me was playing with my neighborhood friend Pheobe Azar. I was probably 5. It was summer time. Neither of us were wearing shoes.

We would meet up every morning after breakfast in John Sain’s front yard because it was halfway between our houses.

The adults were all indoors, busy, off to work, so it was just us kids outside. Sometimes other kids would join us. Her brother John. My brother Sam. The Beale kids, the Weible kids, the Cozart kids. Inside belonged to the adults. When we were inside, they were always telling us what to do, but outside . . . That was the place where we felt free.

I’ve done this exercise dozens of times with groups of adults, then asked them to share their beautiful moments.

Most of the time, those beautiful moments came while playing outdoors.

Usually, like in my memory, the adults were somewhere else. We were unsupervised, or at least not directly supervised.

Another common characteristic is the sense that we had all the time in the world. In a just-released conversation with "The Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast, she tells the story of how she recently rediscovered this feeling while killing time under a pine tree with her grandchild where they had ducked to escape a sudden rain storm.

People rarely mention toys, but they often talk about playing in nature, with sticks and rocks and hills and water.

Usually, these beautiful memories involve other children, of all ages.

And finally, a huge percentage of our beautiful moments involve us doing things that our parents would probably have forbidden. This is what we adults call risk, but as children it was just play.

Outdoors, unsupervised, lots of time, few toys, other children, and risk: that's the stuff of our beautiful memories. That's the stuff of an authentic childhood.

Being a parent today is much more difficult, I think, than it was when Maggie Dent and I were kids. We don't have the freedom to simply let our children roam our neighborhoods. Even the very nature of what it means to be a parent has changed.

In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, psychology professor, researcher Alison Gopnik discusses an academic literature search she performed using the key word “parenting." What she found was stunning. She says that the word barely appeared in the literature before about 1962, but since that time, the use of the word has exploded into the millions.

She sees this as significant. As she puts it, we’ve taken a relationship – being a parent – and turned it into a verb – parenting. She points out that this is the only foundational relationship we’ve done this to. We don’t do wifing. We don’t do husbanding. We don't do childing. We don’t do friending. No, we are a wife. We are a husband. We are a child. We are a friend.

The central metaphor in Gopnik's book is that we’ve made parenting into a job, like being a carpenter. And as carpenters, we will now be judged by the quality of our work. The table is too wobbly. It’s not level. It’s made from the wrong kind of wood. Except now, we’re being judged by the quality of our parenting, which fundamentally changes the relationship we have with our children. Now, we can’t just let them play, outside, unsupervised, with lots of time, few toys, and other children, even if we were allow to. Now, we have to manufacture our children, or else.

Gopnik agrees with Maggie Dent that play is central to early learning – it is foundational. She urges us to try to ignore the cultural push to make us carpenters and instead consider our role more along the lines of gardeners. We plant and water the seed. We protect it. We make sure it gets enough sun and other nutrients, but beyond that it’s the seed's job to do the growing, to become what is meant to be.

This is how most children throughout most of human history have grown up. It’s how evolution designed us to learn and thrive. It's what we re-discover when we step back and allow our children to engage the world through their own curiosity. We may not be able to, or even want to, recreate our own childhood's for today's children, but when we remember our own beautiful moments it reminds of what an authentic childhood feels like, and inspires us to set the children in our lives as free as we can, and then perhaps a little more, so that they will grow up to have their own beautiful moments upon which to reflect.

******

Check out my full conversation with Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Maggie, as well as director of Defending the Early Years Dr. Den, and the founder of Free-Range Parenting Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Play is Liberation

I didn’t start out my adult life as a teacher. I have a degree in journalism with a minor in English. I’ve been a junior business executive, a freelance writer, and a baseball coach. It wasn’t until I was close to 40-years-old that I found myself with my own preschool classroom full of 3-5 year olds.

I didn’t know much that first year, but one thing I did know was that I didn’t want to spend my days bossing kids around. So I decided that, in the spirit of the grand experiment of democracy, these children were going to make their own rules.

So, on that first day of class, we started in an official state of anarchy.

And sure enough, within the first 15 minutes of class, a child complained to me: “I was playing with that doll and she took it from me.” In a standard school, I would have had to trundle over to the offending party and, in the role of cop, say something like, “No taking things from other people.” She then would have been faced with the choice: obey or disobey. 

If she chose to obey, then the lesson taught was compliance to rules passed down from on high.

If she chose to disobey, I would have had to insist, or resort to force, or threaten her with a punishment.

I didn’t want to be teaching either lesson. Unbeknownst to me, I was taking a stand on behalf of liberation pedagogy.

Instead, I was left with saying, “Oh no. I can tell you didn’t like that.” And then to the whole group, I asked, “Does anyone want other people to take things from them?” There were shouts of “No!” and lots of shaking heads.

I said, “Nobody likes that. Why don’t we all agree to not take things from other people?”

And we all agreed so I ripped a sheet of paper from an art paper roller, taped it to the wall, and wrote at the top: Agreements. Then under that I wrote: “No taking things from other people.”

Then a child called out, “Unless you ask them first.”

Everyone agreed to that as well.

Then right there, in the matter of a few minutes, these free children in an anarchistic society, agreed, by consensus, to a dozen other things.

No hitting people

No kicking people

No yelling in people’s ears

No throwing hard things at people

No dumping water on people’s heads . . .

And to each of them, they added, “Unless you ask them first.”

We weren’t, as a society, talking about consent in the 90’s, but these free children were.

There are so many reasons that young children should be free to play. It is the way nature has designed us to develop and learn: cognitively, socially, emotionally, and physically. 

We don’t often talk about play in the context of democracy, but that's exactly what I did recently with director of the non-profit Defending the Early Years, professor, and author Dr. Denisha Jones on Teacher Tom's Podcast. As she told me, when the adults are able to step back to become co-learners with the children, to see children as full-formed citizens with both rights and responsibilities, we see that play is equality. Play is equity. Play is justice. And, ultimately, play is liberation.

******

Check out my full conversation with Dr. Denisha Jones on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Jones, as well as "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and the founder of Free-Range Parenting Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

In a World of Bubble-Wrapped Children

As a boy, even as young as 4, mom would say, “Tom, you're driving me crazy. Go outside.” And then she would close the door behind me, not expecting to see me again until she rang the dinner bell – and she had a literal dinner bell as did all the other moms in the neighborhood.

Most of my childhood memories involve being outdoors, with other children, unsupervised.

I interviewed Lenore Skenazy for a just released episode of Teacher Tom's Podcast. She tells us that in stark contrast to my childhood, there is today an "expectation" that virtually every minute of a child’s life must be supervised by a responsible adult. The result is that today’s preschoolers will spend their entire childhood’s under adult supervision. 

You may know Lenore as the founder of the Free-Range Parenting Movement and all-round advocate for childhood independence. Among her work is the Free-Range Parenting blog and book. She is the creator of “Take Our Children to the Park & Leave Them There Day” and hosted the reality TV show “America’s Worst Mom." She is also more recently the founder and face of Let Grow, a non-profit that promotes Free Range Parenting and childhood independence.

Today, my mom – and all the other moms on my block – would receive a visit from child protective services . . . Or worse!

Is the world more dangerous now than it was 50 years ago? Not according to crime statistics. Today, our violent crime and property crimes rates are about the same as they were when I was a boy, after a spike during the 80s and 90s. 

But we definitely perceive that the crime rate is higher. And as Lenore points out, we are definitely more fearful.

Whatever the case, childhood independence is becoming increasingly rare and unless we take proactive measures, it is only going to become rarer.

I have no illusion that we are about to dramatically change our world or our fears any time soon. That means that it is on us – early childhood educators and parents of young children – to make our schools and homes places in which children can, as Lenore and I discuss, try a few “stupid things.”

It was Lenore's work that inspired me – and gave me the courage – to start putting woodworking tools into the hands of young children. 

As you think about the important children in your life, what are some things you can do? 

Perhaps the most difficult thing to do is to resist the urge to intervene or caution children over every little thing. As my friend and playworker Meynell Aimes jokes, “I have a three step approach to deciding what to do when a child is playing: take one step back, then take another step back, and then another.”

Obviously, we step in when life and limb are at stake, or when real bullying is happening, but much of the time, it’s our catastrophic imaginations that cause us to act when its entirely unnecessary.

A childhood is incomplete without a few scrapes and bruises . . . maybe even a broken bone or two.

When I first had the courage to bring real hammers and real nails onto the playground, I did it with the utmost of caution. We started with an old tree stump. I set up a ring of caution cones around it, then invited children in one at a time, with eye protection, to take a few swings at a nail that I had started for them. 

That’s all I felt comfortable with at first, but slowly, as I began to see, with my own eyes, the incredible competence of young children . . . .

As I began to see the care and caution that they took on their own . . .

As I realized that my worst fears were very unlikely to be realized . . .

As we all gained experience, we added more hammers – along with other tools – until we had created a full-on woodworking experience for 2-5 year olds. Yes, there were some sore thumbs, but hitting your thumb with a hammer is an inescapable part of the process of learning to use a hammer. I’ll be 63 next week. If I picked up a hammer for the first time today, I assure you I would have to learn the lesson of hitting my thumb.

My point is that we don’t have to put our kids, alone, on a New York City subway (the way Lenore did) or let them run around the neighborhood all day unsupervised in order to give them the experience of childhood independence that everyone needs. We can all start small . . .

Stepping back . . .

Letting them use the stapler . . .

Letting them make their own snacks . . .

Letting them fail a few times in order to learn the lessons of perseverance . . .

We will never go back to the 1970’s, nor should we want to, but with the help of people like Lenore and organizations like Let Grow, it’s not too late for childhood independence.

We can do it in our schools and our homes. 

In a world of bubble-wrapped children, helicopter parenting, and the fear of kidnappers lurking behind every tree, Lenore is the voice of reason we need.

******

Check out my full conversation with Lenore Skenazy on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, in addition to Lenore. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Teacher Tom's Podcast: Taking Play Seriously

Hi. I'm Teacher Tom. And welcome to Teacher Tom's Podcast . . .

That's right, the first three episodes of my brand new podcast have dropped! You can find them at the Mirasee FM Podcast Network page, on Apple Podcasts, and on Spotify. 

The tagline for the podcast is "Taking Play Seriously," and that's exactly what my guests and I do.

Play is not the dessert for young children. It's the main course. Play is the human instinct to educate itself made manifest. Play is the key to healthy intellectual, physical, social, and emotional growth in the earl years. Sadly, today, childhood play is in crisis around the world. Our young children are spending more and more time in those institutions we call school. And, tragically, schools, even preschools, are becoming increasingly academic, forcing our youngest citizens to do things that are no only developmentally inappropriate, but in many cases outright harmful to that development.

Not only that, but even in the evenings and on weekends, children find themselves enrolled in adult-directed activities or in front of screens or even doing homework, when past generations were outdoors, playing.

Play is at least part of the solution to so many of the things that ail us, both individually and as a society. Not only does play supercharge learning, but it sets us free to pursue our passions and become the humans we were meant to be. After all, that's what the world needs: more people who have come alive!

If this podcast has a goal, it's to support early childhood educators, parents of young children, grandparents, caregivers, aunts, uncles and any other adult who loves children, in providing them an authentic, playful childhood.

If you're reading here, you might already be aware that I've been writing almost daily here on the blog for nearly 15 years, that I've written two books, that I offer online courses for educators and parents, and that I travel all over the world to teach, coach, and inspire early childhood educators about play-based pedagogy. Don't worry, I'm not giving any of that up. I'm just adding the podcast.

But that begs the question: Why a podcast?

What other people tell me is that podcasts are the present and possibly the future. They tell me that people today prefer to listen or watch, that they don't read, and that I just need to keep up with the times. I know this isn't entirely true because tens of thousands of you read my blog posts every month, but fair enough, I suppose. I'll be 63 next week. I still have a third of my life ahead of me. I'm not ready to go the way of the ancient scribes who chiseled on stone tablets. So, you know, Teacher Tom is trying to get with the times.

Other people tell me that a podcast will help me reach a new audience. Specifically, a younger, hipper audience. That's a good thing, I think. After all, those are the people raising young children and there will never be a generation of children, parents, and early childhood educators who won't benefit from taking play more seriously . . . And on a very serious note, there is a genuine concern that childhood play is becoming alarmingly rare, which is not just a tragedy for young children, but for humankind.

But in all honestly, those aren't the reason I'm aspiring to be in your ear.

When I was younger, I used to love drive time radio. Specifically, there was a morning show on KLOO AM radio in Corvallis, Oregon, where I went to high school, starring station-owner Bob Houglam, called Toast & Coffee. Basically, what he did each morning along with his co-host, was talk about the community with the community. I always thought it would be fun to have my own show like that.

In a way, that's a little bit like the career I've experienced as a preschool teacher. I mean, you come together each day with your community. You talk and listen. You share, sing, dance, bicker, and agree. Sometimes you have special guests or go on a field trip, but generally ou follow a familiar, comfortable schedule. Then you go home, knowing that you'll come together again at the same time with the same people and do it all over again. This is, for me, the heart of what community is all about.

Community has always stood at the center of my work with young children.

Another thing that some of you might know about me is that I spent the better part of 20 years as a teacher; for most of the time, the only teacher, at the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool in Seattle, Washington.

A cooperative preschool is a school that is owned and operated by the parents who enroll their children. And I’m not talking about symbolic ownership, but actual legal ownership.

Typically, we would enroll 65 or so families each year, and they would become 65 equal owners of the school, with me, the teacher, being the only paid employee. Everything else that goes into running a school was done by the parents. Parents took on all the administrative work, they handled enrollment, gardening, repairs and maintenance, purchasing, food prep, field trip planning, photography, custodial tasks, and anything else that needed to be done. 

When decisions needed to be made, it required the parent community to come together to discuss, debate, and, when consensus was impossible, to vote.

And as the only paid employee, I had, in a very real sense, 65 bosses. They hired me, they evaluated me, and they could, if they so desired, fire me.

Now, I imagine there are some of you educators out there thinking, “No way! I could never have 65 bosses!” I get it, but for me, it never felt that way.

You see, the part of being a cooperative that I came to value above all else, was that each family was required to provide me with an adult, one day a week, to serve as an assistant teacher. That’s right, one day a week, the parent or caregiver came to school with their child to serve under my supervision.

I often think the world would be a better place if more institutions or enterprises worked as cooperatives. I mean, the owners are also the customers and the employees. As customers, the motivation was to get your child a high quality preschool education at the lowest possible price. As employees, you wanted a satisfactory workplace. And as owners, you wanted a business that operated on sound financial principles. 

But it was more than that. Every preschool becomes a community, but in a very real sense, a cooperative becomes a community of families, not unlike a tribe or village or neighborhood.

This is the kind of community humans have evolved to live in. For 99 percent of our existence we were hunter-gatherers living in communities of 20-200, closely-related individuals. It’s only been relatively recently that we’ve begun to aggregate ourselves into larger populations. Many of us have adapted, of course, but for many of us, and especially for young children, smaller communities like the one we created in our cooperative – or like those still found in some neighborhoods or churches or other affinity groups – are our most natural learning and living environments.

That’s my aspiration for this podcast: to become a kind of community for early childhood educators, parents, grandparents, and other caretakers of young children. And my hope is for it to be a community that takes play seriously!

Some of you may already know that I’m a married man. My wife and I have been together since 1984 – married since 1986. That’s nearly 40 years! So, you know, woo hoo! Our only child, Josephine, was born in 1996. When she was in kindergarten, I was talking with the head of her school about community. He said something that has stuck with me: “The sign of a healthy community is how quickly newcomers are brought into the center.”

We’ve all been part of – or tried to be part of – communities that seemed to resist our efforts to take part. Maybe there are too many rules – written and unwritten. Maybe the community is clique-y. Maybe there are divisions and divides that make it impossible to navigate. These are unhealthy communities. I’m hoping that the community that forms around this podcast can be the kind that brings newcomers immediately into its center.

That doesn’t mean that we all have to agree with one another. I mean, I have a few hard lines, like no violence, name-calling, or threats, but when it comes to young children, our adult roles, community, and what it means to be educated, I hope there will be room for everyone.

Another thing you might know about me is that my wife and I have produced global online early childhood education summits called – get ready for it – Teacher Tom’s Play Summit. A couple of years ago, I was interviewing an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin. He asked me to imagine a burning campfire around which people, including you, were sitting. If someone wanted to know more about that campfire, they could ask you to describe the fire. You might talk about the color, the intensity, the way the wood is stacked, what kind of wood you think it is, the smoke, the heat. 

But that’s just the fire from your perspective. If this person really wants to understand that fire, they would have to ask the person sitting next to you to describe it, then the next person, then the next. They would have to do this all the way around the circle until, finally, they had learned about the fire from all perspectives. But even then, Hopi said, they wouldn’t have the full picture of that fire until they asked the birds in the trees . . . Until they asked the trees themselves . . . Until they asked the worms underground . . .

I love this metaphor because it makes it clear that there is always something more to learn because there is always another perspective to consider. It has allowed me to see that when someone disagrees with me, they aren’t my rival, but rather my teacher. Every time I can see the world from another perspective, my own perspective, my own ideas and knowledge get bigger.

In our preschool, this phenomenon came up every year around Easter when the children would debate the details of the Easter Bunny. Some thought the bunny laid eggs. Some thought chickens laid eggs and the bunny just painted them. Some thought the Easter Bunny was a normal sized bunny. Others thought it must be extra large. Some thought there were multiple Easter bunnies. Some thought the Easter Bunny was a girl . . . And, of course, there was always at least one Jewish child who insisted, “Your parents are lying to you!”

These debates could get intense – as debates about faith often do. Sometimes there was even yelling to the point that it sounded a lot like our adult political debates. And like our adult debates, at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone had changed their mind. In fact, most of them become even more convinced of their beliefs.

But that’s not the point. No one’s minds have changed, but what has changed is that now each child can look around and think, “I believe what I believe, but that friend believes something else.” “That friend believes bunnies lay eggs.” “That friend doesn’t believe in the Easter Bunny at all.” As individuals, none of us may have changed, but now, since we both shared and listened to all the perspectives, we have a bigger and more accurate picture of who we are as a community.

And then, the best part, is that the children do what we adults have forgotten how to do. Once the debate is over, they all go outside and get back to playing with each other within the context of this bigger idea of who we are.

I want Teacher Tom's Podcast to be like that campfire or those Easter Bunny debates, which is why most of the episodes will be about me stepping back and sharing the microphone with someone else.

I will be starting off by interviewing people I already know, people with interesting perspectives, people who I hope will help expand your perspective. But if there are people you want to hear from . . . Or people you think I’ll benefit from speaking with . . . Or topics you’re interested in hearing about . . . Shoot me an email (TeacherTomHobson@TeacherTomsWorld.com) and let me know.

Let’s grow our ideas together!

******

Teacher Tom's Podcast is on the air! In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and founder of Free Range Kids Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"If You Eat This Food You Can Have Ice Cream"

The two-year-old said to me, "If you eat this food you can have ice cream." She placed a plate in front of me on which she had positioned a glob of purple play dough. 

I said, "What is it?"

"It's healthy food."

"What kind of healthy food."

"You just have to eat it."

"I'll need a fork."

"I'll get one for you, Teacher Tom." She dug around on the shelf until she found a plastic one. "Here's your fork, now eat your food."

I pretended to take a bite. Sometimes when kids want me to taste their imaginary food, I make a comical face and say, "It's yucky" or "It's too hot!" but this time I said, "That is so good! I'm going to eat it all!" I stabbed the play dough with my fork pretending to shove the whole thing in my mouth, then hid it on my lap while mimicking chewing and swallowing. "Now I'm ready for my ice cream."

The "ice cream" was more play dough she held in a container. For a moment I thought she was going to serve it to me, but then she said, "First you have to take your bath, then you can have some ice cream."

"I don't want to take a bath."

"You have to take a bath if want to have some ice cream."

"I'll need a wash cloth."

"I'll get one for you, Teacher Tom." She found a small blanket in our cradle of baby dolls. "Here's your wash cloth."

I mimed bathing, then said, "All clean and fresh, now I'm ready for that ice cream."

"No, first you have to put on your jammies."

"I don't want to put on my jammies."

"You have to put on your jammies, then you can have some ice cream."

It went a couple more rounds like this. It was clear that I wasn't going to get any ice cream.

It was all pretend. The food wasn't real, the bath wasn't real, the pajamas weren't real. Even the ice cream wasn't real. Nothing about this was real, it was all a child's game, yet as she dangled that reward always just out of reach, I found a thread of growing annoyance and helplessness underneath my play. I felt manipulated and controlled. I'd jumped through her hoops, yet there was always another placed before me. The game was pretend, but the emotions it evoked were real.

Just think how much stronger those emotions would be were I the child, she the adult, and it was not a game, but rather a part of my day-to-day reality. 

******

 

"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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I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Getting Back to Playing With One Another

Some years ago, an older relative got remarried. Her first marriage, a stormy one by all accounts, had lasted decades, producing two children. The divorce had seemed inevitable to her loved ones and her second marriage to a more even-keeled man seemed a good idea. One evening over drinks, however, she confessed to me that she fought with her new husband almost as much as her former. "I divorced the first man because of the fighting. Now I'm having the same fights with my second husband. If I'd known that I was the problem I would have never gotten divorced in the first place."

Psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler was among the first to point out this marital phenomenon, asserting that a person filing for divorce is often unconsciously trying to rid themselves of their "own inner conflict" by fighting "with great energy against (their) partner, on whom the conflict as been projected." His conclusion, which mirrors my older relative's experience, is that these people will almost certainly find another spouse in order to continue their quarrel.

As sad and tragic as her confession was to me, the essential truth of it has become one of the cornerstones of my relationship with my wife. We fight, as all couples do, but in the aftermath of every spat, sometimes right in the midst of it, I ask myself, "Am I the problem here?" And more often than not, I see that I am, at least in part, and that's the part I have the best chance of controlling. This isn't to say that I'm in the wrong or that I'm not making excellent points, but that the strong emotion at the center is my an inner conflict, a sense of sadness or fear or despair that has nothing to do with my wife.

Last year, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection in our country. "Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately half of US adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness. Disconnection fundamentally affects our mental, physical, and societal health. In fact, loneliness and isolation increase the risk for individuals to develop mental health challenges in their lives, and lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking daily." Surveys find that 27 percent of us report being estranged from a family member -- that's 67 million of us in the US alone whose conflicts with relatives are so extreme that they've ended the relationship. I have no doubt that some of that estrangement is valid, but I'm also quite certain that much of it, if not most, comes down to unresolved inner conflicts.

Our news is full of stories about our political divides, gun massacres, homelessness, racism, and sexism. Existentialist philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre, in his play No Exit, penned the line, "Hell is other people." Abstracted from its context, the sentiment appears to be one of a kind with the misanthropic writings of the most (tragically) influential philosophers of the modern era, Thomas Hobbes, who starts from the premise that humans are essentially evil and that without the control and order provided by institutions like government, church and schools, life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Too many of us have adopted some version of the "hell is other people" perspective. We see it in the cynicism, even nihilism, with which so many approach the prospect of communal life. We see it in the resignation, isolation, self-destruction, and alienation experienced by broad swaths of society. 

Yet, when we look more deeply, we see that Hobbes' entire philosophy, and therefore the fruit of Hobbesianism, is based on a "state of nature" that has never existed. It's a thought experiment that ignores the actual practices of humankind. Indeed, throughout most of human existence, our species has practiced a kind of communal collaboration that historian and author Yuval Noah Harari argues (in his book Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind) is our single most significant adaptive trait. Rutger Bregman makes a similar assertion in his book Humankind in which he systematically dismantles the weak science behind the modern "proofs" used to support the Hobbesian point of view. And a closer reading of Sartre finds that the real meaning behind his famous and abused line is that "hell is other people" only if our relationships with them are bad.

Bregman writes "If we believe most people can't be trusted, that's how we'll treat each other, to everyone's detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because ultimately, you get what you expect to get. If we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times -- from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of one another -- then I think the place we need to start is our view of human nature."

The great tragedy of our current era, it seems to me, and the nub of our loneliness, division, and misanthropy is that we have been taught (by capitalism, by colonialism, by racism, by fascism, by if-it-bleeds-it-lead journalism) is to distrust one another. And like with any vicious cycle, the more completely we learn these lessons, the more we hide away from one another, the more we are convinced that all of our problems come from outside ourselves.

Distrust is what makes our problems seem unsolvable. Distrust is what makes us throw up our hands over the climate, homelessness, and racism. And distrust, I believe, stands at the heart of our loneliness crisis. Humans have evolved to thrive by trusting one another, but our modern world is built upon the dubious mental experiments of Thomas Hobbes and his ilk who view conflict as our greatest flaw when, in fact, it is, when we put relationships first, our greatest glory.

At any given moment in a play-based preschool classroom, conflict is emerging. The Hobbsian approach is for the adults to place their authoritarian thumb on the scales, to take control, and to dictate solutions. Yet, when we put relationships first we understand that the goal is not to efficiently end the conflict, but rather to support the children in resolving their conflicts in ways that preserve and strengthen their relationships with one another. And this usually means acknowledging the thing that my older relative only learned after divorce and remarriage: at least part of the problem is me. As adults, our primary responsibility is safety (which is why we stop any violence), but beyond that these conflicts are the children's to resolve. When we can free ourselves from Hobbesian distrust and step back, what we find is that even very young children are capable of resolving their own conflicts, often in ways that surprise us, motivated by the urge to get back to playing with one another.

And isn't that our highest goal as a species: getting back to playing with one another?

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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