Sep 28, 2020
Lesson Learned
First, I am not a parent and having children will not be in the cards for me. Despite not having children, I have frequently judged the parenting of my family, friends, and acquaintances. I have made negative comments about them. I have given unsolicited advice/recommendations. I have thought to myself that if they were my children, they wouldn’t be misbehaving and/or would be doing so much better. Is it the Psy.D behind my name, my own arrogance, human nature, and/or lack of actual experience that gave me the false belief that I am all knowing? Regardless of where it came from, recent experiences, reading the “Empathy Field Guide” and article of human-centered design, and our group project with Thrive reminded me that it shouldn’t be there.
This semester, my husband and I offered to take my nieces (8 and 10) from Arizona who are required to home school (through public education) until January due to COVID-19. My sister is a teacher but is required to teach from school virtually; which, leaves my nieces home alone. So far, we have had the girls for two months and I am truly ashamed that I ever criticized a parent and/or a teacher for that matter. Immersing myself into a role of a caregiver & teacher has given me a new level of awareness and insight. Raising a child is hard work! If one could measure empathy or increase their empathic responses mine has doubled in the last two months from this experience. Never again will I judge a parent for having a child with messy hair or feeding their kids boxed mac and cheese for a week straight. Instead of giving my sisters advice on how they can do better, I will be calling to just check-in and give a supportive ear.
Our group is working with Thrive, who is currently expanding their social and emotional learning program to parents. They are developing a parent well-being program to include self-care, positive parenting techniques, and ways to improve staff (teacher)-parent communication. They appear to be using a human-centered design approach by looking at the whole unit (students, teachers, school leaders, and parents). Listening to our mentor & founder of Thrive- Jyothi, I was incredibly impressed and inspired with her passion and ideas to improve the lives of those she works with. I also thought to myself that the United States public education system could learn so much from Thrive. Through her program, children in low-income schools are obtaining 40 minutes of social and emotional learning a day during the school day. The parents are receiving phone calls to check-in on their well-being twice a week. Her work with Thrive seems absolutely ground breaking and I wonder what we (the United States) could do if we broke free of our arrogance by decolonizing design, using a more human-centered design approach, and really incorporated more empathy into our every day life.
