11/03/2025
As an OT, I am most often — probably 80% of the time — working with kids in a 1:1 setting, where it’s just them and me. I’m also, often, working with children who feel antagonized by adults all day long, and so in a nutshell, if there’s a conflict I can drop, if there’s anything I can defer, I drop it, I defer it, as much as humanly possible.
[Side story: I had a child I worked with who desperately wanted to control as much as they could. They would often appear to be trying to pick a fight with the adults around them. I shocked them quite a lot early on with how much I was willing to let go. “You walk up the left side of the stairs and I’ll walk up the right.” “Okay.” “No, I mean you walk up the right side and I’ll walk up the left.” “Okay.” “No, now you have to stop and let me go first.” “Okay, as long as I can see you.” “Now you can come up one stair. Now you can come up the next stair. Now…”
It took a lot of time (and biting my tongue) up front, but over time, the child grew to really really trust me, and it was significantly worth it to me.]
But I sometimes work with groups of children, and I also parent two children, and in those contexts, my approach is pretty different. With children who are peers, or close in age (my own kids are a year and a half apart), I do a great deal of intentionally not solving their problems.
Sometimes it’s really hard. Sometimes I still give my adult-imposed solutions. “Why don’t you just have the toy for five minutes and then she can have it for five minutes?” Sometimes inside my brain I’m just like, “For goodness sake, this does not have to be this complicated! This doesn’t even matter!”
Then I remember that I want my son to know how to say, when he’s 15, to a peer OR to an adult, “No, that’s not going to work for me. I don’t feel right about that. We need to keep talking about this.”
And I want my daughter to be able to say, when she’s an adult, to a coworker or to a boss, “I just don’t see that plan working. Let’s figure out what we both want, and how to get there.”
And that starts, right now, with me standing between them — blocking any physical fight, any snatching, hitting, pushing — and echoing what I’m hearing them say, or repeating it for one another’s sake. “It sounds like both kids have different things they want to build with these pillows.” (Pause for him to speak.) “He’s saying he wants to use them to build a plane.” (Pause for her to speak.) “It sounds like she would rather make a slide.” (Pause for him to speak.) “He says he doesn’t want to make a slide.” (Pause.) “She says she really wants to make a slide.”
And yes — if I was the one playing 1:1 with a child I could *easily* say, “Oh sure! How about the plane has a slide on it?” or “Okay sure, we can make what you want to make” or “There’s like 27 couch pillows, I bet you can make something and I can make something different” or “Here, you use the pillows, I’ll go over here and make mine out of these mats instead”. I could compromise, or defer, or move to something else, or share materials, or collaborate. I can do all those things *because I am an adult*. Because I’ve had years and years to practice conflicting.
And that’s precisely why it’s so important to me to protect kids’ rights to have the same practice.
[Image description: A quote pulled from a Teacher Tom article, which reads, “So often, as adults, we view playground conflict as failure, but...we have to understand that conflict is as central to child's play as running, jumping, laughing, and singing. They will only learn how to do it through practice.” The quote is overlaid over an image of children standing around on a merry-go-round/roundabout on a playground. End description.]
