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
------
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.
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