What the Playground Knows That We Forgot: Rebuilding Trust, Respect, and Conflict Skills

A dear friend recently sent me a video by a historian summarizing last week's news. Trust broken. Relationships fractured. Conversations devolving into the kind of language my second-grade teacher would have sent someone to the corner for. This was not a neighborhood dispute. This was the world.

We are living in a time of historic change in our country and in the world, and the story could unfold in any number of directions. I don't know how it ends. I am certain, though, that our collective participation, the way each of us shows up with our families, our neighbors, and the strangers we pass, will help make or break the outcome.

I stayed pensive for days after that video, and for a reason I couldn't name at first, my mind went to a conversation on friendship that I recently had with my granddaughters, who are now 9 and 7.

Both of my granddaughters are natural-born directors. Give them a backyard and a few willing participants and they will sit with their imaginary bullhorns telling everyone where to stand, where to walk, and exactly what to say. I love watching it, and I also watch what happens to the cast. I have not met anyone, no matter how old or how small, who enjoys being cast in someone else's story without room to ad lib. We all want our autonomy.

That was on my mind when I asked them about friendship. I asked them to tell me about the kids at school who have a lot of friends. What are they like? What do you like about them? What do other people like about them? Then I asked the question I most wanted them to think about: what kind of friend do you want to be?

Their answers came back to kindness, again and again. The kids with lots of friends share. They notice when someone is sad, and they care about it. They try to help. They aren't critical, and they don't need to make anyone feel small. Neither girl mentioned who was the smartest, the funniest, the loudest, or the one in charge, which I found interesting coming from two girls who love being in charge. Neither mentioned who had the most stuff. They mentioned a smile, generosity, a helping hand, caring. Even in elementary school, it is clear that while the bully may get a moment of acquiescence, they do not get loyalty, support, or collaboration. They may win the battle, but they are going to lose the war.

There is something else the playground knows. Children fall out with each other constantly. They argue over the rules, someone storms off, someone cries, and the next morning they are back on the same blacktop deciding what to play. The rupture is not the end of the relationship. Somewhere between second grade and adulthood, we started treating a single broken conversation as permanent.

Are Our Family Conflicts and Our World Conflicts Really So Different?

Watch that pattern long enough and you start seeing it everywhere. After years of sitting with families, teams, and communities in conflict, I have come to believe that our family conflicts, our neighborhood conflicts, our social conflicts, and our geopolitical conflicts closely resemble one another. They are the same conflicts scaled up. The needs underneath them are the same, and the way they escalate is the same. We stop talking to each other, we tell ourselves a story about the other side, we start building coalitions and calling people onto our team, and eventually we reach the point where we are willing to sink the whole ship as long as the other person goes down with it. As conflict scales, the weapons get greater and the risk gets greater. A sibling standoff over a parent's care can cost a family its holidays for a decade. The same pattern between nations costs lives.

Earlier this year I wrote about a Pew Research Center finding that the United States was the only one of 25 countries surveyed where a majority of adults viewed their fellow citizens as morally bad. That finding stays with me, because it describes a country where we have stopped expecting good things from the people next door. Isolation follows that expectation, in our neighborhoods and in the world.

What Do Children Already Understand About Belonging and Conflict Skills?

The needs driving all of it, at every scale, are the ones the girls named without knowing they were naming them. In mediation, I talk about the needs that sit underneath every conflict: safety, autonomy, belonging, appreciation, acceptance, significance, and face, which is our dignity and our ability to save face in front of others. Children feel every one of those needs long before they have words for them, and when I listened to the girls, I heard those needs answered one by one. Sharing tells someone they belong. Concern tells them they matter. Help tells them they are safe with you. Refusing to make anyone feel small protects their face, and in my experience, that is the need most dangerous to injure. Shame and humiliation escalate conflict faster than almost anything else, in families and between nations.

I learned something about this at a recent talk I gave to a group of men. When I talked about kindness, they told me they preferred the word respect. It was a great lesson for me, because underneath the different word, they were describing what the girls described: treating someone in a way that lets them keep their dignity. Call it kindness or call it respect, the people we are drawn to are the ones who make room for us in the story.

What Would It Take to Borrow a Cup of Sugar Again?

I want my grandchildren to grow up without worrying that bombs will be dropped, that they will run out of water, or that AI will wipe out humanity. I also want them to grow up without worrying that they can't knock on a neighbor's door when they need a cup of sugar. I put that last one on the list on purpose, because it is the one within reach for every one of us today. I cannot stop a war from my kitchen in St. Louis. I can learn my neighbor's name, ask how she is doing and wait for the real answer, and be someone she would feel comfortable asking for help.

I won't pretend we are in an easy place. Escalated conflict is dangerous, and we are living in escalated conflict, at kitchen tables and between nations. At this stage, the pull is to fight harder or to withdraw and wait for it to pass, and I have not seen either one help a family find their way forward. What helps, in every mediation room I've sat in and every critical care unit I worked in, is someone staying steady enough to keep the conversation going. Kindness under pressure and a steadfast commitment to respect are skills, and from the outside they look like de-escalation. There aren't people problems, there are skills gaps, and skills can be learned at 7, at 9, and at any age after that.

What Does Rebuilding Look Like?

Repair is less dramatic than the break. In mediation, when people come back to each other, it rarely happens because someone delivered a speech or won an argument. (Has anyone ever "won" an argument?) It happens because one person went first, said something small and true, and then did what they said they would do. Then they did it again the following week. Trust is rebuilt at the speed of demonstrated reliability, which is slower than any of us would like and faster than we fear when someone is willing to start.

Going first feels like exposure, and it is. Extending respect to someone who has not yet extended it to you costs something, and there is no guarantee it will be returned. We don't do it to get something back, though. We do it because that's who we choose to be. What I have seen in mediation rooms is that it changes the other person's next move more often than people expect. Someone has to stop the pattern, and the person who goes first gets to decide what comes next rather than waiting to see what is done to them.

This is not a return to some better era when everyone got along, because I don't believe that era existed for everyone. It is building something we have not had, one conversation, one neighbor, one repaired relationship at a time.

How Do We Leave It All on the Table?

The historian said that when she reflects on this period in history later, she wants to be able to say that she gave her all, that she left it all on the table, that she left the world as good as she could and fought back against hate. Every day I ask myself how I can do that. For me, fighting back against hate rarely looks like a fight. It looks like refusing to make anyone feel small, including the people I disagree with most, and helping people have the conversations they have been avoiding so they can find their own way forward. It's watching how I label, blame, and judge, and reminding myself that all of us are more than our worst moments.

I don't have the power to end a war. I do have what I say and do today, and what I say and do matters now, maybe more than it ever has. This week I am going to pay extra attention to the criticism and judgment I make in my head and in private. It is a small thing, and small things are how every conflict I have ever seen turn around began.

I think about this when I watch my granddaughters. They are studying us, the way children always do, learning what adults do when someone disagrees with them. They learn it from how we talk about the neighbor who let his grass go, from what we say in the car after church, from whether an argument in our house ends in repair or in silence. They will practice on the playground what they see practiced at home, and one day they will practice it at work, in their marriages, and in whatever version of this country we hand them. We are leaving them a world, and we are also leaving them the skills they will have to meet it with. That motivates everything I do.

Whatever we are modeling right now is the curriculum.

My granddaughters will keep directing, and I hope they do, because the world needs people willing to pick up the bullhorn. I hope they also keep what they already know, that the story gets better when the cast gets to bring themselves to it. When everyone has a bullhorn, instead of your way or my way, we co-create a better way.

Our power and our strength lie in our togetherness, with respect for our differences. When I disagree with you, that doesn't have to mean I'm against you. It means I'm different from you, and different is not the same as difficult. Fractured, we are weaker and more isolated, with fewer people to reach out to when we need help. In an age of family estrangement, I have told more than one client that if we keep firing the people who step on our toes, we are going to run out of people. That scales globally as well. We need the ability to come back to each other after we have stepped on toes, because we will.

None of this is about being nice. Nice is pleasant and optional, and it will not hold under pressure. This is about capacity. A family that can disagree and stay in the room makes better decisions about a parent's care than one where half the siblings have stopped speaking. A team that can argue well solves problems the agreeable team never sees. Nations that keep talking keep options that nations at war have already lost. We need each other, not because it is the kind thing to say, but because almost nothing that matters gets solved alone, and every person we cut off is one less person available when we need help.

Some will hear this as naive, yet I see its truth every day. If we learn and practice conflict management skills, the same skills mediators use, and come to understand that we each see the world differently and that's okay, then we can see one another the way the girls see the kids on the playground. I don't expect nations to play nice any time soon. Countries move slowly, and the damage of the last decades will take longer still to repair. What I do expect is that it starts where it has always started, with people who decide to go first, and that it moves outward from there at the pace of human relationships rather than the pace we wish for.

The clearest answer I found to a hard week in the world came from a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old. We get to decide who we will be, and that decision can change generations.

What kind of friend or neighbor do you want to be this week?

Kimberly Best, RN, MA, is a court-listed mediator in Missouri and Tennessee and the founder of Best Conflict Solutions in St. Louis, serving clients nationwide. If you are navigating a conflict at home or at work and want to talk through what a way forward could look like, reach out through the contact page.