Collaboration

Collaboration

My granddaughter loves to play board games. One of her favorites is Hoot Owl Hoot! produced by Peaceable Kingdom. To win this game, players work together to get owlets safely into their nest before the sun rises. Players collaborate instead of compete. 

In Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, Roberta Michnick Golenkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek detail key skills necessary for success in today’s workforce. The first of these is collaboration, the action of working jointly to produce or create, or working together to “build community and mutual respect.” To be successful in today's world, children must learn to work together to achieve a common goal.

Developing collaborative skills takes time. A baby’s world is firmly centered in self. A baby screaming in the middle of the night is not worrying about Mom and Dad getting enough sleep. They want what they want now! As they grow, babies learn, through interaction with their parents and others, to look beyond their own needs. Parents encourage children to express their feelings in quieter ways and to wait for their needs to be met. 

Toddlers gradually learn to share possessions and conversations but they can’t yet interpret or value alternate points of view. My toy is MY toy. Why should I share? With gentle guidance from their parents most begin to respect others’ needs and purposes. Arguing with siblings helps too. Shouts and tears eventually lead to compromise and collaboration.

Back-and-forth interactions — building sand castles with friends, helping with chores, and sharing toys with siblings help children develop interactive skills. Parents can ask children for their ideas and opinions and introduce them to new situations and people. Children grow from “How can I get my way” to “How can I help you?”

As they grow, children develop greater collaborative skills. In school, they team for projects and learning activities. Teachers encourage students to share books, art materials, and ideas. Friends create imaginary worlds in which they share trials and triumphs. One child drives the bus and the other becomes his passenger — then they switch roles. Common goals are set and discussed. Solutions are communal. 

Golenkoff and Hirsh-Pasek write that “Working together really builds understanding.” When children collaborate, they learn more — about the world, their studies, their friends, and themselves. They walk arm-in-arm, brain-with-brain, forward to success. 

When playing a Hoot Owl Hoot!, or collaborating on any project, children work together to reach a goal. The opponent is not the other players but a common problem — getting the owls safely to bed before the sun rises, building the best sand castle ever, learning to read, creating a supportive community, and becoming successful in today’s challenging world. Working together, they all win. 

(This is the second in a series of articles inspired by Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D. I encourage you to read it.)

Reality is Personal

Reality is Personal

My little friend Jack is a world traveler — well, his parents travel and he tags along.  When he returned from a trip to South Africa, we asked him what Africa was like. Two and a half-year-old Jack answered, “Well, it’s a lot like a house.” 

Jack’s perspective might be a bit small. South Africa is many things. An adult traveler might mention safari parks, native peoples, and penguins on the beach, but to Jack, who lives in an apartment most of the year, Africa is a house. Perspective shapes our reality.

Journalist Brooke Gladstone, in The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on the Moral Panic of Our Time, writes that America is a place of shifting realities. Each person views the world through a “prism” which shapes their reality. That is, each person looks at the world, and the facts presented by science, society, or history, to create their own reality. Gladstone defines reality as “what forms after we filter, arrange and prioritize … facts and marinate them in our values and traditions.” For every person on earth, “Reality is personal.”

Reality slides, shifts, and tumbles from person to person, family to family, city to suburb, farm to factory. Every member of a single family will perceive reality from a different place. A parent views reality from a position of responsibility. A child sees reality from a position of play. Dad runs around turning off lights (thinking about the electric bill) while Tommy runs the TV, computer, microwave, and stereo at the same time. The eldest sibling sees the world differently from the youngest. “How does he get away with so much? Mom and Dad never let me do any of those things!”

If realities can be so different within one family, think about the variety of realities that exist in a classroom, a church, a city, a state, and a nation. Politicians and the media present us with “facts,” which each of us sifts through our beliefs, traditions, knowledge, and biases, sort into categories, and stamp as true or false. My reality, that which I perceive as true to my circumstances and convictions, may never match yours — in fact, it may never even get close.

Problems arise when we don’t acknowledge that these differing realities exist. We stand firm and say, “My way or the highway. My candidate is honest. Yours lies. My interests are important. Yours are trivial. Life is not fair for me but you get all the breaks.” Gladstone suggests that our inability to acknowledge the value of others’ realities prevents us from working together to make a better world.

Without an objective reality, our subjective realities divide us. Gladstone writes that “… we cannot see the real world, whatever that may be. We live in the world that we made from what we see and what we know, and also in the world, we didn’t make and do not see and do not know.” We struggle with differing realities that may never be reconciled. 

Gladstone ends her short book with hope. “We cannot fully enter someone else’s [reality]. But if we really look, we might actually see that other reality reflected in that person’s eyes…” When we listen to others and try to understand the reality in which they live, we come closer together. Instead of clashing, differing realities may sit down, have a meaningful conversation, and work toward mutual understanding. 

Jack’s house may not be all that Africa is, but when we try to understand the realities of another, we can sit down on the porch and enjoy the view together.