A Turning Point for Relational Intelligence
Insights From a Front Row Seat at Child Development/Work-Family Research
A new book has arrived on the scene—a book whose timing feels just right. It’s Love to Learn by Isabelle Hau of Stanford University. As its subtitle says, it’s about “the transformative power of care and connection,” summarizing research and promoting the term, “relational intelligence.”
You might wonder why this is so timely? Researchers have been talking about the primacy of relationships to children’s development for decades.
I remember the then renowned psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University at a meeting at my house in the 1980s sharing his conclusion from decades of research: “Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”
I remember the now renowned pediatrician Jack Shonkoff of Harvard University when I interviewed him for my book Mind in the Making in the early 2000s sharing a key finding from the years spent studying the science of early childhood development for the National Academy of Sciences’ report, Neurons to Neighborhoods: “There is no development without relationships.”
This has certainly been a key finding in my own research over these decades but hasn’t reached the currency it deserves. Why?
Insight 1: It’s easier to focus on things you can count.
There wasn’t even a strong measure for relationship quality in the 1990s when a team of us from universities and non-profits worked to evaluate a series of state, community, and business initiatives designed to improve child care quality.1 We had to use a combination of measures that were mainly designed to study the relationship between parents and their children.
A premise of the quality-improvement efforts we were studying was that if they improved things you could count (the number of children in a class, the number of children for each adult or staff:child ratio, teacher compensation and teacher training—or what’s called structural quality), then overall quality would be ensured. However, in study after study, we found that although these did matter—and importantly could even predict better relationships between teachers and children, relationships were what I came to think of the swing vote factor.
As one example, we did an evaluation of a state-of-the-art corporate child care center that was stunning and checked the boxes on class size, staff:child ratios, compensation and training. However, we found that its overall quality was mediocre because of a lack of warm and responsive relationships between teachers and children.2
As a result of our study, the center decision-makers made some changes to improve relationship quality, including staff replacements, becoming accredited by NAEYC and training teachers on how to provide sensitive and responsive interactions. This is what the Harvard Center on the Developing Child calls serve and return interactions—the child does something and the adult responds in caring and responsive ways, like a game of tennis, back and forth.
Our findings on a follow-up evaluation? When teachers learned how to interact with children in ways that were sensitive and responsive, the quality of that program improved in ways that positively affected children’s development and learning.
And now? I still see efforts to improve early childhood education that don’t emphasize relationships enough. Yes, this can be measured. It’s not either/other; it’s both-and.
Insight 2: It’s easier to focus on things that seem more durable.
Kids understand the importance of relationships. I will never forget doing a focus group with seventh graders in Chicago about learning. They told me they knew what kind of year they were going to have when they walked into their classrooms on the first day of school.
I asked how they knew.
They told me they looked at the teachers’ eyes. They could tell from the teachers’ eyes whether the teachers wanted to be in that classroom or not; whether they liked kids or not; whether they liked teaching or not.
Looking at teachers’ eyes? That seems fleeting.
My Breakthrough Years studies in the 2020s found that we can get beneath what’s in adults’ eyes and measure another important aspects of relationships—the extent to which relationships meet kids’ basic psychological needs for:
Caring connection—helping them feel they belong and are supported;
Agency—helping them feel they have some autonomy and are treated with respect;
Mastery—helping them feel they are competent yet challenged;
Identity—helping them feel they can become the person they want to be; and
Purpose—helping them feel they can give back to others.
We assessed how often a nationally representative group of nine through nineteen-year-olds felt that their important relationships met these needs. By important relationships, we included relationships with families, friends, the people at school, the people in out-of-school activities, and the people online.
And when the pandemic happened, we went back to the same young people to see how they were faring.
Our pandemic findings? We found that when young people had prior relationships with others that met basic psychological needs, they were faring very well during the pandemic—both academically and in terms of their mental health. The effects of the pandemic on children were deeply affected by the relationships in their lives!
And now? I see us focusing on social media and learning loss. Yes, these are important, but let’s not forget that they take place within and not apart from relationships and relationships can have durable impact, even in a time that’s as tumultuous as a pandemic. It’s both-and.
Insight 3: It easier to focus on things that society deems valuable.
For thirty years, my organization conducted a series of nationally representative studies of the U.S. workforce. We had over 600 data points in each of these studies and we conducted regression analyses to determine the factors that were most predictive of making work “work” for employees and employers —that is, they were predictive of what mattered to employees (e.g., health, stress, depression, life satisfaction, work-life conflict, etc.) and to employers (e.g., intention to remain with the organization, job engagement, etc.).
Our workplace study findings? In the end, it came down to relationships. Salaries, benefits, and workplace policies are the floor of an effective workplace, but these take place within relationships.
And now? I still see a focus on salaries, benefits, and policies. You can have these, but if your coworkers don’t make you feel you’re a part of the group you work with or if your boss doesn’t treat you with respect when you face a sick child or elder needing care, you are more likely to experience stress and depression and less likely to be engaged in and want to remain in your job. Again, it’s both-and.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
When I read Love to Learn in galleys last summer, I was especially struck that Isabelle Hau takes on some of the notions that additionally stand in the way of focusing on relationships in the early years, including pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps or lone-cowboy beliefs–that people succeed on their own myth.
When Love to Learn was published, Isabelle invited me to speak at some book events. One was hosted by The Burke Foundation. Unbeknownst to her and their executive director, Atiya Weiss, I’d worked with Jim Burke, its founder in the 1980s, when he was CEO of Johnson & Johnson and my experiences exemplify how relationally intelligent he was.
At the time, J&J leaders saw relationships as the cornerstone of their newly launched work-family program and put this knowledge into action by changing the J&J Credo, their code of business ethics, which then had only been changed three times. The language change in the Credo was people-centric—making it clear that employees are responsible for supporting each other in fulfilling personal and family responsibilities. And they backed this up with manager training, plus programs and policies. It was a both-and approach.
Jim Burke was a highly admired CEO—a man respected for how he faced a 1982 crisis when Tylenol bottles were tampered with and capsules laced with cyanide, which caused the deaths of seven people. He apologized publicly and at a big cost to the company, all Tylenol was recalled. The company then led the way toward tamper-proof packaging.
At the launch meeting in 1989, Jim Burke said that changing the Credo was one of the most important things he had done in his career. It didn’t escape those of us present that here was a man standing up for what might be seen as a feminine value—the power of caring. It’s not just a feminine value, it’s a human value.
That was 36 years ago. I am hopeful that we are now ready to focus on the importance of relational intelligence as critical to our own and our kids’ learning and thriving. Thank you Isabelle Hau!
I'm so grateful you're reading Research to Thrive By on Substack! My book, The Breakthrough Years is available for purchase here.
Susan Kontos, Carrollee Howes, Mary Beth Shinn, and Ellen Galinsky, Quality in Family Child Care and Relative Care (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994); Annette Sibley, Martha Abbott‑Shim, and Ellen Galinsky, Child Care Licensing: Georgia Impact Study (Atlanta, GA: Quality Assist, Inc., 1996); Carrollee Howes, and Ellen Galinsky, The Johnson & Johnson Child Development Center Accreditation Study (Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1995); Carrollee Howes, et al., The Florida Child Care Quality Improvement Study 1996 Report (New York, NY: Families and Work Institute, 1996).
Carrollee Howes, and Ellen Galinsky, The Johnson & Johnson Child Development Center Accreditation Study (Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1995).