Is it safe? Is it kind? Revisited

Little people are learning so much about their world, and just like they hammer on play dough to see what will happen, just like they endlessly build ramps for their cars, just like they swirl paint colors mixing across paper, they are figuring out how to play with each other. They are figuring out what happens when they invite a friend to play, when they tell a friend their idea, when the follow a friends lead, and, yes, when they tell a friend "You're not my best friend anymore!"
This socialization is perhaps the most complicated work of a preschooler. The Ooey Gooey Lady, Lisa Murray tells a story about a parent meeting where families were very concerned about their preschoolers academic progress. She asked the families for a show of hands: "How many of you know all you colors?" and everyone raised their hands. Her next question also resulted in a full show of hands: "How many of you have trouble getting along with someone at work?"
The work of social development is particularly rich in early childhood, as young children work within their ego-centric phase of development to figure out how to play with other children. This starts, of course, in what my friend Carol Wolf calls the "Sharing is stupid" phase of development. "I have it," (whatever it is), "and you can't have it." Slowly slowly two and three year olds start to figure out that other children are doing cool stuff, cool stuff that they could do too. They play alongside each other, copy ideas and play schema. They make offerings, sharing a play dough tool, or adding a sprinkle of sand to their friend's sand cake.

And pretty soon, they are engaging in the most wondrous of things: cooperative play! And here is where a teacher's job gets really tricky. How do I support their play, helping them gain the skills without imposing my adult ideas, without squashing the joyful exploration? Betty Jones, a brilliant teacher and professor from my graduate school Pacific Oaks College, literally wrote the book on teachers' roles in children's play. According to Betty, teachers are the stage managers, mediators, players, scribes, assessors, communicators, and planners. Most of these are pretty self-evident, but the one that I come back to again and again is being the mediator. Each year in my classroom, I hear the loud declaration, "You can't come to my birthday party!" or the even more dangerous quiet hiss, "You're not my best friend anymore!" Sometimes there has been a provocation leading up to this exchange, sometimes not. But in just about every case, the child doing the declaring looks vaguely triumphant, the other child crestfallen. The thing that is true about three and four year olds is that for the most part, they are not yet the mean girl bullies of Rachel Simmons. Just like they are experimenting with the physical properties of sand as they sift it through their fingers at the sensory table, they are trying to figure out how friendship works, and so as mediators we have to figure out how to support this development.

At this point, it is often tempting as the teacher to step in with the blanket statement, inspired by Vivian Paley's wonderful book,"You can't say you can't play."  (For exceptions to this rule, check out Teacher Tom's post, Sometimes, you can say you can't play.) If I have laid the ground work with the group of children, this reminder will sometimes work. (The groundwork often includes many interactive and overly dramatized puppet shows.) Other times, it involves conversations about how that makes the other child feel, probing into what the cause of the problem is, and sometimes even a trip to the Peace Table. At Morning Meeting, I introduced the ideas of three simple questions: "Is it safe? Is it kind? Does it build community?" and the first two questions have been picked up by many kids in the class. The trick that I have to remember is that I am also bound by these same questions, and that in my mediation, in desire to help the crying child or to right a perceived wrong, I also should be kind.