Subject: Systems thinking for preschoolers

Posted by Zahir Balaporia on 12/11/2008
In Reply To:Systems thinking for preschoolers Posted by Kahina Lasfer on 12/8/2008

Message:

I can only speak to experiments with my own children (who are 5 and 8) over the last few years. When they were 3 and 6, I had some limited success. I built simple causal loop diagrams with smiley faces and other simple artwork to demonstrate certain common issues we were dealing with. We called them games. Here are two examples.
1. The telling the truth game - How telling the truth builds trust which builds respect which leads to more privileges and rewards, which should make you feel good and encourage you to tell the truth. However lying erodes that trust which then causes more supervision needs, takes more time, means less time for TV; also affects the next time when you DO tell the truth but there is a lack of trust....
2. Doing things right the first time game - I ask you to wash your hands, you come out in 2 secs, I ask if you used soap, you get upset that I sent you back in to wash again, results in a tantrum, I get upset, .... the cycle repeats the next day. But if you did it right the first time, I am proud of you, I am not upset, after dinner treats may increase, we have more time, can do fun things together.

In my heavily biased and small scale experiment, I believe I saw:
• A recognition for cause and effect, seperated a little more in space and time. e.g. my actions before dinner resulted in less time for games before bed time, not because daddy said no, but because not washing my hands properly the first time + tantrum took up that precious time between dinner and bed time.
• A calming effect from looking at the diagrams. When there was a melt down, I would ask "do you want to look at the 'do it right game'?" and there was a calming effect as we walked through the loops to see how the actions from a few minutes ago had resulted in a negative outcome.
• the ability for them to walk me through the "game"with minimal prompting. It was also good for some laughs as the reasoning wasn't always how I had intended.
I hope that helps. I would love to hear if others have tried someting like this. If not, give it a try and then let me know how it goes. I would recommend only using it on very meaningful problems for them, nothing abstract.

Cheers.

Zahir Balaporia