Creating a Culture of Friendship

02/11/2019

Creating a Culture of Friendship

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: They must not do too much of it: And they must have a sense of success in it.
John Ruskin

Lella Gandini, writing in the book, Connecting: Friendships in the Lives of Young Children and Their Teachers, edited by Dennie Palmer Wolf and Bonnie Neugebauer, describes the “social climate” of many Italian preschools:

“One event has always stuck in my mind as illustrating this climate. Once on a visit to an Italian child care center, I saw a little girl snatch a balloon from another three year old, who burst into tears. The teacher came over and knelt down to speak to the little girl who was hanging on to the balloon fiercely. All the teacher said was, “Non vedi che lo fai piangere?” (“Don’t you see you are making him cry?”) The little girl stared at her playmate. The teacher caressed her and then went away, without ever demanding that the child give back the balloon or apologize.

The teacher alerted the child to the feelings of her friend, but never punished or shamed her. She assumed that her role was to highlight the consequences of the little girl’s actions for her friend and then leave the children to find a way of going back to playing together. I was quite struck by how typical the incident was. There was very little concern about property rights, justice, right and wrong. Instead there was an effort on the part of an adult to draw out empathy and to create a situation in which both children could rejoin each other in playing.

That kind of attention to feeling and empathy is stressed at every chance. If a child cries when her mother or father leaves, teachers don’t tend to the tears themselves – they often call over other children and ask them to give kisses, to hold hands, to invite the crying child to play…If one child has trouble sleeping at nap, a teacher may ask another child to climb up on the cot to comfort the restless one; she may even encourage them to sleep side by side – something which I suspect many American teachers might not feel comfortable doing.”

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