The Value of Conflct

This week’s article summary is Kids, Would You Please Start Fighting?

Seems like an odd article choice as we head into Thanksgiving Break, a time of fellowship, family, and gratitude.

Yet, as many of us have experienced firsthand on Thanksgiving, bringing together family members often results in arguing, screaming, hurt feelings, and wounded pride around topics ranging from the banal like sports to the more serious like religion and politics.

The article below intrigued to me in that it stressed how important it is for kids to see and experience conflict and to practice dealing with it—learning how to argue with both passion and respect, to justify one’s position with evidence and sound reasoning, to persuade others, to reconsider based on new ideas and evidence, and perhaps to despite dialogue to agree to disagree.

This article made me think about my parenting and teacher styles that perhaps over emphasized getting along and being nice to everyone. As adults, we can often paint too rosy a picture of how the world is supposed to work.

The article helped me alter my perspective a bit to be more open and forthcoming with kids about the reality and importance of conflict and how to deal with it, including one’s emotions, productively and respectfully.

One of our Program Pillars is empowering students, and part of this is helping kids self-advocate, understand that everyone has opinions that may differ from others, and expressing and debating those different opinions and ideas is healthy for all.

So next Thursday, when your crazy uncle (and all families seem to have one) brings up some controversial political topic as you’re considering a second slice of pumpkin pie, take a deep breath, enjoy the conversation, and know you’re modeling how to lean into discomfort.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving Break.

Joe

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When Wilbur and Orville Wright finished their flight at Kitty Hawk, Americans celebrated the brotherly bond. The brothers had grown up playing together, they had been in the newspaper business together, they had built an airplane together. They even said they “thought together.”

These are our images of creativity: filled with harmony. Innovation, we think, is something magical that happens when people find synchrony together. It’s why one of the cardinal rules of brainstorming is “withhold criticism.” You want people to build on one another’s ideas, not shoot them down. But that’s not how creativity really happens.

When the Wright brothers said they thought together, what they really meant is that they argued together. One of their pivotal decisions was the design of a propeller for their plane. They squabbled for weeks, often shouting back and forth for hours. Only after thoroughly decimating each other’s arguments did it dawn on them that they were both wrong. They needed not one but two propellers, which could be spun in opposite directions to create a kind of rotating wing. “I don’t think they really got mad,” their mechanic marveled, “but they sure got awfully hot.”

The skill to get hot without getting mad — to have a good argument that doesn’t become personal — is critical in life. But it’s one that few parents teach to their children. We want to give kids a stable home, so we stop siblings from quarreling and we have our own arguments behind closed doors. Yet if kids never get exposed to disagreement, we’ll end up limiting their creativity.

Teaching kids to argue is more important than ever. Now we live in a time when voices that might offend are silenced on college campuses, when politics has become an untouchable topic in many circles, even more fraught than religion or race. We should know better: Our legal system is based on the idea that arguments are necessary for justice. For our society to remain free and open, kids need to learn the value of open disagreement.

It turns out that highly creative adults often grow up in families full of tension. Not fistfights or personal insults, but real disagreements. When adults in their early 30s were asked to write imaginative stories, the most creative ones came from those whose parents had the most conflict. Their parents had clashing views on how to raise children. They had different values and attitudes and interests. And when highly creative architects and scientists were compared with their technically skilled but less original peers, the innovators often had more friction in their families.

Wilbur and Orville Wright came from such a family. Their father, a preacher, never met a moral fight he wasn’t willing to pick. They watched him clash with school authorities who weren’t fond of his decision to let his kids miss a half-day of school from time to time to learn on their own. Their father believed so much in embracing arguments that despite being a bishop in the local church, he had multiple books by atheists in his library — and encouraged his children to read them.

If we rarely see a spat, we learn to shy away from the threat of conflict. Witnessing arguments — and participating in them — helps us grow a thicker skin. We develop the will to fight uphill battles and the skill to win those battles, and the resilience to lose a battle today without losing our resolve tomorrow. For the Wright brothers, argument was the family trade and a fierce one was something to be savored. Conflict was something to embrace and resolve.

The Wright brothers weren’t alone. The Beatles fought over instruments and lyrics and melodies. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony clashed over the right way to win the right to vote. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak argued incessantly while designing the first Apple computer. None of these people succeeded in spite of the drama — they flourished because of it. Brainstorming groups generate 16 percent more ideas when the members are encouraged to criticize one another.

If no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up on old ways of doing things, let alone try new ones. We’re at our most imaginative when we’re out of sync. There’s no better time than childhood to learn how to dish it out — and to take it.

Children need to learn the value of thoughtful disagreement. Sadly, many parents teach kids that if they disagree with someone, it’s polite to hold their tongues.

What if we taught kids that silence is bad manners? It disrespects the other person’s ability to have a civil argument — and it disrespects the value of your own viewpoint and your own voice. It’s a sign of respect to care enough about someone’s opinion that you’re willing to challenge it.

We can also help by having disagreements openly in front of our kids. Most parents hide their conflicts: They want to present a united front, and they don’t want kids to worry. But when parents disagree with each other, kids learn to think for themselves. They discover that no authority has a monopoly on truth. They become more tolerant of ambiguity. Rather than conforming to others’ opinions, they come to rely on their own independent judgment.

It doesn’t seem to matter how often parents argue; what counts is how they handle arguments when they happen. Creativity tends to flourish in families that are “tense but secure.” In a recent study of children ages 5 to 7, the ones whose parents argued constructively felt more emotionally safe. Over the next three years, those kids showed greater empathy and concern for others. They were friendlier and more helpful toward their classmates in school.

Instead of trying to prevent arguments, we should be modeling courteous conflict and teaching kids how to have healthy disagreements. We can start with four rules:

• Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict
• Argue as if you’re right but listen as if you’re wrong
• Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective
• Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them

               

Good arguments are wobbly: a team or family might rock back and forth but it never tips over. If kids don’t learn to wobble, they never learn to walk; they end up standing still.

Benefits of Unstructured Time

This week’s article summary is Too Many Structured Activities Hinder Children's Executive Functioning.

Most of us make the connection between unstructured play and the development of creativity and imagination.

But recent studies show that unstructured play also supports the development of executive functioning skills in kids.

And executive function skills, e.g., the ability to self-regulate, organize, focus, plan, and follow through, are important aids for subsequent success in school and life. 

As skill development takes practice, we all naturally need trial-and-error opportunities to become more proficient in our executive functioning.

And when we have choices about what we do and how we do it, we are learning to be responsible for and in control of our lives and actions.

So while, yes, unstructured time allows us to be imaginative and creative, it also helps develop other vital skills, habits, and attitudes that will help us be more successful in school and beyond.

Joe

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When children spend more time in structured activities, they get worse at working toward goals, making decisions, and regulating their behavior.

Instead, kids might learn more when they have the responsibility to decide for themselves what they're going to do with their time. Kids who spent more time in less-structured activities have more highly-developed self-directed executive function.

Self-directed executive function develops mostly during childhood, and it includes any mental processes that help us work toward achieving goals—like planning, decision making, manipulating information, switching between tasks, and inhibiting unwanted thoughts and feelings. It is an early indicator of school readiness and academic performance, and it even predicts success into adulthood. Children with higher executive function will be healthier, wealthier, and more socially stable throughout their lives.

When children are in control of how they spend their time, they are able to get more practice working toward goals and figuring out what to do next. For instance, a child with a free afternoon ahead of her might decide to read a book. Once she's finished, she might decide to draw a picture about the book, and then she'll decide to show the drawing to her family. This child will learn more than another child who completes the same activities, but is given explicit instructions throughout the process. 

Structured time could slow the development of self-directed control, since adults in such scenarios can provide external cues and reminders about what should happen, and when.

The ability to self-direct can spell the difference between an independent student, who can be relied upon to get her work done while chaos reigns around her, and a dependent, aimless student. When we reduce the amount of free playtime in American preschools and kindergartens, our children stand to lose more than an opportunity to play house and cops and robbers.

The New Teenage Rebel

This week’s article summary is Alt-Right as the New Rebel: Adolescence in the Trump Era.

As all adults know and lived through, adolescence is the time to rebel against the status quo. During middle school, high school, and college most of us pushed back against conventional norms—differing only in the degree of our rebellion. As a first born, I’d categorize myself as rebel lite.

I recall my seventeen-year-old son coming home one afternoon after getting his ear pierced. When neither my wife nor I voiced displeasure at what he thought was teen defiance against the establishment and parents, he nevertheless protested to us like Spartacus against Roman authority, “It’s my ear and I’ll do with it what I want!” While a mundane event to my wife and me, for our son this was a bold step in separating from his parents and beginning to define his individuality.

I was too young to really understand the 1972 presidential election, yet I could tell that older people generally supported Nixon (the conventional, conservative Republican candidate) and younger people generally supported McGovern (the radical Democrat). Even though Nixon won in a historic landslide (only to resign in disgrace two years later due to Watergate), many of the 60s ideals that McGovern represented were already being absorbed into mainstream America, soon becoming standard norms in what became a more socially liberal society.

So what happens when teenage angst and the need to rebel come in conflict with today’s more liberal social values? As the article below describes, some of today’s teens adopt extreme right wing political and social positions.

While I understand the need for teenage rebellion and experimentation, I worry about the hateful, vitriolic, bigoted, violent ideologies some kids are embracing.

I have been a teacher since 1980 and a registered independent voter since 1976 and the current climate of division and extremism in the US is the worst I have seen.

It’s tough enough to be an adult in today’s polarized world, let alone being a confused teenager.

One way to combat extremism is for adults—liberal, moderate, conservative—to be better role model for kids. We need to demonstrate civility, humility, and fallibility. We need to show kids that it is possible to have respectful, rational, and peaceful dialogue with those we disagree. We need to be open to difference and try to find commonality, agreement, and compromise wherever possible. We must not vilify those we disagree with crass sarcasm and humiliation, and we need to stand up to those who do.

I chose teaching as a career because I hoped to shape and influence young minds and attitudes as my teachers did for me, and I remain optimistic that our country with all its blemishes continues on its journey towards the ideals of equity, inclusion, and justice.

Yes, our country is in a confusing and even mean place right now, yet remember that most kids, after their inevitable rebellious phase, more often than not end up with values similar to their parents.

Let adolescents rebel as they need to, but we adults still need to guide them to avoid today’s ugly extremes.

Joe

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Today's teens have the same need to push back against adult authority and social conformity as their parents' generation. Rather than choosing tattoos and cigarettes, some are opting to do so in a way that horrifies their socially responsible families ... by adopting the nationalist views of the alt-right.

Erik Erikson, the developmental psychologist best known for his theory of human social development, defines adolescence as a period of ego-identity versus role-confusion. This is the time in our lives where we push back against the boundaries of social norms and familial rules to see where the lines are really drawn and where we fit into them. This push allows us to bounce ideas of identity off the mirror of society and family. The resistance that is likely to develop at this stage of growth gives us a self-concept and self-awareness necessary to enter into society with our own identities.

No parent would tell you this is a fun stage of child rearing. Most, however, can relate to their own terrible teens and recognize this behavior as a normal way to push back against parents. Belly-button piercings, sneaking smokes, and sneaking out might have been their own private rebellion back in the '80s and '90s. Leaning toward liberal issues were another way of pushing back against parents who tended to be more socially conservative.

Underneath her cardigan, one of my colleagues wears tattoos and a liberal's bleeding heart on her sleeve. At home, she's raising her two teenage sons with another woman—two teenage sons that are now identifying with socially conservative political ideas. As an educator, she's aware of the stages of child development yet still shocked by their turn toward the right. How can two boys raised in a loving, socially conscious home lean toward policies so against the self-interest of the family? Is this a new trend for young teenagers?

While adopting conservative ideas is a far cry from spouting alt-right propaganda, this trend can be seen in more disturbing examples with increasing frequency. Last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son posted a disturbingly anti-Semitic message on Facebook. Schools are reporting higher incidents of hate crimes, and in my own school district, we've had to deal with alt-right memes, messages, and sentiment. 

How much of this sentiment is actually rooted in students' belief systems, and how much of this is simply the need for teens to rebel? This is a question keeping parents and educators up at night, because they require very different responses.

If parents are sporting their own tattoos and piercings, then perhaps rebellion simply needed a new face. Like Family Ties' Alex P. Keaton, a staunch conservative platform can be a pushback to the largely liberal leanings of leftist families. Sometimes a reaction is the ultimate goal.

Along with pushing back, however, adolescence is also an easy time to be drawn right in. Role models and peer groups have an unnerving influence on a teen's risk-taking behavior. Youth who are struggling to find themselves become increasingly easy acolytes for extreme causes.

Sometimes the clearly drawn lines of black and white offered by fundamentalists provide a system of structure and security for young minds suddenly seeing all the gray areas of life.

How, then, to react when you catch your kid with a Nazi flag or sharing racist memes?

Like all parenting, there is no rulebook for this. Experts say the key is keeping the conversation going and (here's the hard part), listening more than you talk. While ideas and identity will start to take shape during the teenage years, these indicators will be elastic for many years to come as experience and perspective grow and develop. While it feels in the moment that you are hitting a brick wall in confrontations with your rebellious teen, you are more of a sounding board than you realize in this critical stage of development.