Everything We Need to Learn About Relationships, We Learn from Simple, Everyday Interactions
by Junlei Li & Dana Winters
This is the sixth in a series of blogs from the editors and authors of It Takes an Ecosystem: Understanding the People, Places, and Possibilities of Learning and Development Across Settings. This blog focuses on the chapter “The Power of Simple, Ordinary Interactions in Developmental Relationships Across Contexts”. A new blog highlighting a chapter or theme of the book will be posted every other week.
We love observing, thinking, and talking about the relationships between adults and youth. Whenever we have opportunities to spend time with adults who serve young people — in classrooms, out of school time programs, neighborhoods, or institutions like hospitals or residential youth care — we learn more about what adult-youth relationships are, why they matter, and what might empower or diminish them.
A long while ago, Junlei was facilitating a workshop at a child and youth welfare conference. During the break, a participant came up to talk. “I am a caseworker for foster care placement,” he spoke with both a sense of seriousness and urgency, “and I agree with everything you are saying about the importance of relationships. And that is why I am thinking about quitting my job.” He went on to explain that he had learned all about attachment theory and relationship-building with youth in social work school and was fully committed to building just the kind of relationships youth in foster care would need. But the longer he worked as a caseworker, the more he felt that he did not have the time or opportunity to sustain relationships. He talked about seeing his “cases” only every few weeks, and often a youth would be reassigned or relocated just as he thought he made some progress. He was disheartened and said that he was not the only one who felt like that among his fellow young social workers. While we did not have a satisfying response for young staff like that, his urgent question remained with us.
Around the same time, Dana was carrying a camcorder and microphone around the city of Pittsburgh — capturing moments from contexts as different as crossing guards on street corners to child life specialists at Children’s Hospital. One of the remarkable things about all these professionals was their capacity to use whatever time they had — mere seconds or minutes — to incrementally build on their relationships with the young persons who came across the street corners or hospital wings. In a video recording that we have since used frequently to illustrate this capacity, the crossing guard used 5–10 seconds of time to walk alongside the children from one side of the intersection to the other.
She commented on their new coat or glasses or nails, asked about their school election, and sent a message of encouragement home to a child’s parent. It was almost as if she kept a continuously updated spreadsheet that tracked details about each child and family and figured out a way to say something personal about each one to tell them that she knows them, she thinks about them, and she sees them. Across the town in the hospital, child life specialists may see a child for the duration of an appointment, a surgical preparation, or for weeks during more intensive hospitalization. Even with their ever-increasing caseload, they show up to listen, reassure, and play, all to make the abnormality of hospital life as normal and manageable for children as possible. Most children come through their care just once and may never see them again. Some children build a short relationship with them during their stay and move on.
The intersection of these observations and conversations made one thing clear for us — in the real world, relationships do not conform to textbook prescriptions of where, how, with whom, and with how much time. Relationships can grow from even the smallest, most ordinary, and seemingly mundane interactions — and relationships need not always be intense, endured, and lifelong to be helpful. Human interactions — particularly those within the helping relationships — are highly adaptive to the resources and limitations of their environments. Across developmental contexts, these relationships are the foundational drivers of learning and development. For some youths, the relationships even become the essential protective buffer against chronic exposure to stress and adversity. Having even one of these relationships matters to the youth’s development and well-being, even if no one single relationship can meet all of the youth’s needs.
The availability and quality of these relationships are determined by relational practices — in the forms of caregiving, teaching, community-building — at home, school, and community programs and neighborhoods. Relational practices, in turn, are shaped by structures, systems, and policies. Programs and systems can be designed with a focus on how decisions impact relational practices both immediate to the youth and in parallel to the adult-child connections. The Simple Interactions Approach is one way we have developed to complement other existing approaches and interventions (e.g., professional development, coaching, mentoring) to support relational thinking and action across all developmental ecosystems.
To support others in reflecting on lessons from their simple, everyday interactions, we arrived at this simple question:
How do we help to encourage, enrich, and empower the human interactions around youth and their helpers?
No matter what roles or responsibilities each of us holds, or whether we seek to impact relational practice, youth programs, or system building, this question can serve as a guidepost to focus our efforts.
About the Authors
Junlei Li, PhD, is the co-chair of the Human Development and Education Program and the Saul Zaentz Senior Lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Dana Winters, PhD, is the Rita M. McGinley Executive Director of the Fred Rogers Center at Saint Vincent College.
