Watching Counts

There is a peculiar moment at children’s parties when a perfectly happy child is standing six feet away from an activity and an adult becomes alarmed.

“Do you want to join?”

No.

“Are you sure?”

Yes.

“Come on, it’ll be fun.”

We have now asked three times.

The child was apparently enjoying the revolutionary new activity known as looking at it.

I think we should allow this.

Watching counts.

Standing nearby counts.

Doing half of it counts.

Coming back later counts.

Holding the tape for someone else counts.

Eating cake while everybody else becomes deeply invested in constructing a cardboard bridge absolutely counts.

Children are guests.

They are not employees at mandatory team-building day.

Participation is not proof that the activity worked

This is an easy trap.

We planned the thing.

We bought the materials.

We created twelve charming little stations.

There are instructions.

There may even be tiny aprons.

Somebody is going to participate if we have to personally place a glue stick into every child’s hand.

But a full activity table is not necessarily evidence of a good activity.

Sometimes children are there because an adult told them to go there.

Sometimes they are waiting for the cake.

Sometimes one highly committed child is actually doing the activity while six others hover nearby, periodically stealing pompoms.

That may be fine.

The goal does not need to be uniform engagement.

This is a party, not a clinical trial.

Children have different distances from fun

Some children enter a room at full speed.

They are in.

No orientation period.

Within ninety seconds they have located the loudest activity, removed one shoe for reasons that will never become clear and joined a group of children they met approximately six minutes ago.

Other children arrive slowly.

They need to see who is there.

They need to understand the room.

They want to stand with their adult.

They may watch an activity through two entire rounds before deciding it is safe, interesting or worth leaving the cookie for.

And some children genuinely do not want to do it.

That is not a design failure.

A good event can hold more than one speed.

Build an edge

This is one of the simplest things I would change about children’s activities.

Give them an edge.

Not every activity needs to begin with crossing an invisible social threshold and announcing, yes, I would like to participate now.

Let the outside be interesting too.

If children are building something, give watchers somewhere to see it happening without standing directly in the work area.

If something is being tested, make the testing visible.

If the room is changing, a child can experience the change without personally causing it.

If there is drawing, leave a long shared surface where someone can make one mark and leave.

The activity should have degrees of entry.

Look.

Approach.

Touch.

Add one thing.

Stay.

Come back.

That is much kinder than PARTICIPATING and NOT PARTICIPATING as though we are sorting luggage.

Stop assigning reluctant children a job

This is the well-intentioned version.

“Oh, you don’t have to make one. You can be our official photographer!”

Perhaps the child wanted no official position whatsoever.

Maybe they were quite busy eating a cracker.

We do not need to rehabilitate nonparticipation into another form of participation.

Observation can just be observation.

Adults are allowed to sit on a bench at a museum and stare at a painting without being recruited to become Deputy Curator.

Children can stand beside the glider table without becoming Wind Monitor.

If they want the badge, marvelous.

If they do not, leave them gloriously unemployed.

The best activity may keep working after someone walks away

I am much more interested in activities that alter the shared environment than activities designed solely to produce twenty-four identical objects that immediately disappear into twenty-four paper bags.

Let somebody add a flag.

Move a marker.

Tape a road.

Hang a paper shape.

Add a leaf.

Choose a light.

Build one piece of a structure.

Leave a message.

Contribute to something larger.

Now participation can be tiny and still matter.

A child can spend thirty seconds doing one thing and see it remain in the room.

They do not have to complete the “project.”

There is no project.

The room is simply becoming more itself because children are in it.

That is a very different proposition.

Competition is one engine. We have others.

Children’s activities frequently arrive wearing the same machinery.

Fastest.

Highest.

Most.

Best.

Winner.

Again.

Competition can be fantastic.

Some children love it.

A relay race can be absolute chaos in the best possible way.

But we use competition so often because it gives the activity a ready-made ending.

Someone wins.

Done.

There are other ways to create momentum.

Discovery.

Construction.

Experiment.

Collection.

Transformation.

A secret.

A shared problem.

Something absurd that needs fixing.

Something that grows.

Something that changes when enough people touch it.

Something hidden.

Something that appears only under a different light.

Now the pleasure is not necessarily beating somebody.

It is finding out what happens.

Children are rather fond of finding out what happens.

Do not turn every quiet child into a problem to solve

This is worth saying plainly.

The loudest child is not having the most fun by definition.

The child who performs enthusiasm in the way adults recognize is not automatically the child receiving the richest experience.

There is a lot happening inside a child who is watching.

They may be learning the rules.

Deciding whether they trust the equipment.

Following another child’s process.

Waiting for a particular material.

Enjoying the spectacle.

Recovering from the previous thing.

Or, yes, possibly bored out of their mind.

We can observe.

We can offer.

We do not need to continuously intervene.

One of the great gifts of a well-designed environment is that adults do not have to narrate every available possibility.

Make the room legible enough that children can choose

This is where design starts doing some of the hosting.

If an activity needs a five-minute verbal briefing, six laminated rules and one adult shouting over the music, the room is not helping enough.

A child should be able to understand quite a lot from seeing it.

Things to build are on the build table.

Finished pieces are appearing overhead.

Objects to test move toward a clear testing area.

Materials return somewhere obvious.

The quiet table looks quiet.

The loud thing is very clearly over there.

This does not mean eliminating explanation.

It means the environment carries part of the instruction.

That gives children more independence and gives adults considerably less reason to spend the afternoon saying, “No, no, that goes over here.”

A party is not school with better cake

This may be the governing sentence.

Children spend a great deal of their lives being told when to sit, where to stand, what to finish, when to move, how long to stay and what counts as completion.

A party has room to be looser.

Not unsafe.

Not completely feral.

We are still keeping everyone out of the loading dock.

But looser.

You can participate.

You can stop.

You can come back.

You can watch.

You can decide the thing everybody else is obsessed with is completely uninteresting and spend fifteen minutes studying the giant cardboard pencil instead.

The event should be sturdy enough to survive that choice.

The child standing at the edge is still inside the world

That is the piece I would protect.

We sometimes design participation as though the event only becomes real when a child agrees to perform the activity we prepared.

I think the room should already be doing something.

There should already be something to see, notice, discover, hear, follow or wonder about.

The activity adds another doorway.

It is not the admission ticket.

So build the beautiful thing.

Make the strange thing move.

Put materials on the table.

Let the enormous paper flower slowly acquire twenty mismatched petals.

And if one child spends the whole time standing three feet away, watching everybody else attach theirs?

Fine.

They saw the flower grow.

Where this goes next

Read next: The Best Activity Changes Something takes the same respect for different kinds of participation and asks what changes when a child decides to join in.

See it in a world: Second Thoughts, Same Room shows a world that can keep changing around children without requiring every child to perform the change themselves.

See it in practice

These Worlds put the argument into a room, a sequence and a set of decisions.

• The Room Changed Its Mind
• The Door Department Lost One