Education in the 21st century is obsessed with assessing children, attempting to measure every aspect of their intelligence, learning and growth.
Yet we are not, according to Isabelle Hau, measuring what matters: relationships.
“There’s a disconnect between what we know is really critical and then what we’re paying attention to,” says Hau, executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and author of a new book about the essential role of relationships in healthy human development.
“Certainly in our school systems,” she adds, “we’re paying attention to a lot of testing and cognitive measures, but nobody really knows where our kids are with regard to relationships.”
Hau, an early childhood champion and former impact investor, attributes much of her own eventual success to experiences she had in her early, formative years, including bonds she made with loving parents and caring teachers. In her first book, “Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education,” which comes out on Feb. 11, she unearths troves of research and threads together narratives from around the globe to back up an idea that she has long known to be true in her own life.
“The secret recipe to learning and thriving,” she writes in the book, “starts with a simple key ingredient: early, loving relationships.”
The trouble, as Hau details, is that for many children, those relationships are in decline.
Screens are replacing in-person, authentic social interactions. Families are having fewer children, living farther away from extended relatives such as grandparents, and not supplementing those shifts with friendships or community-based social bonds. And children, once left to explore and play freely, are more likely to be enrolled in scheduled activities and follow structured days.
As a result, both the quality and the quantity of children’s relationships are dwindling. Today, it’s estimated that one out of every five young children lack a single caring adult in their life.
In “Love to Learn,” Hau argues that we must not only reverse this trend but reframe our entire understanding of the impact of relationships and connection on young children and, indeed, adults of all ages.
EdSurge had a chance to speak with the author about her motivations for writing the book and the solutions she sees to what she calls the “relational deprivation crisis.”
The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
EdSurge: What inspired you to write this book in the first place, and why did you decide to write it now?
Isabelle Hau: The primary driver of writing this book is actually tied to a personal story, which I described in the book. It really is deeply personal, because early childhood in many ways transformed my own trajectory.
When I was 3 years old, I was a late … everything. I was a late walker. Children are, in general, walking at around 12 to 18 months. At 3 years old, I was still trying. I was a late talker as well, which is typically more concerning in a child development journey. So my parents had me take a psychological test, and the psychological test came back and essentially said that I had low academic aptitude — which, when you are a parent, is not exactly the message that you want to get for your child at age 3.
My parents took that message in a way that was very calm and continued to shower me with a lot of love. What they did was they enrolled me in this beautiful child care. In France, where I was born, we have access to amazing, high-quality systems starting very early on. So I went to this beautiful child care facility that I believe really transformed my trajectory, and then shortly after, I was enrolled in a public preschool where, similarly — and I so vividly remember some experiences there — I strongly believe it changed my life.
All of this is to say that this topic of the importance of the early years is deeply personal, and tying it to relationships and what made it so critical for me is really what drove me to write this book.
On the, ‘why now’? This is actually an interesting question that you’re asking. I started writing the book in the middle of the pandemic, after meeting a pediatrician and neuroscientist named Dani Dumitriu, who is an amazing professor at Columbia University. She has these dual researcher and practitioner hats. She was tracking all the moms who were having babies at the New York Presbyterian Hospital. She had data before the pandemic, but certainly was tracking all the data on moms and their babies during the pandemic in New York City. And the data that she had shared with me was deeply, deeply concerning.
She was showing that 80 percent of babies that were born at the onset of the pandemic did not have a strong emotional connection based on one of the measures that she was using. Eighty percent. So of course you say, ‘OK, well maybe this was one point in time in New York City at the onset of the pandemic. Maybe this is an exceptional data point.’
But she shared another number that I thought was in some ways equally, if not more, concerning: Before the pandemic even occurred, 40 percent of young children did not have a strong emotional connection with their mothers. And so while the 80 percent is obviously deeply, deeply concerning, I actually was even more concerned about, OK, in a steady state, normal, without any stress of the pandemic or other external factors, without any major crises, we are not doing great. We have so many little ones that do not have what every single scientist with knowledge of these things knows is the most important, which is deep, strong relationships.
So the ‘why now’ is the realization that we are in the midst of a relational crisis that we are not paying enough attention to. So ‘why now’ was obviously triggered by the pandemic, but really the much broader realization that yes, scientists are saying that relationships matter — and we all know that, by the way. We don’t need scientists to tell us that. It’s very intuitive. But we are not paying attention to them, and in fact, it’s deteriorating under our eyes for a variety of reasons.
You mentioned the “relational deprivation crisis” we’re experiencing today, which you discuss at length in your book. What do you think is driving this? Because obviously, as the data points out, it pre-dates the pandemic.
There are multiple factors. Let me actually point to three of them.
One is simply the family structure. So families are getting smaller; we have fewer children per family. Let me give you one data point. The number of families with one child only in the U.S. has doubled over the past 20 years. It’s now a little bit over 20 percent of families who have one child only. So of course, as a result, young children have fewer siblings to play with and grow up with. Similarly, there’s more and more families — it’s actually one of the exceptionalisms of the U.S. — that are single-parent households, and those numbers have also been going up over the past few decades. So essentially we have smaller families, and also grandparents are living farther and farther away.
The second factor is play. So play is a big driver in forming friendships for all of us — children and adults alike — but certainly for young children it’s a huge factor. Many researchers have looked at the intersection of play and the number of friendships, and there is a clear connection. Play has been receding in our societies due to many factors, but one that I’m concerned about — and I see it in my own family life — is that kids are overscheduled.
There are so many activities because we are all on this race to college earlier and earlier. So we have all these structured activities that kids are involved in, and there’s less free play. I see it in my own home. When I think about my children’s schedules, they’re, like, crazy, especially relative to mine when I was growing up. So it’s really interesting.
The third factor is technology. technology is one of those beautiful tools that can make us more connected, but the way we use technology has also a lot of downsides that I am actually quite worried about for relationships.
The latest data show that any one of us, any adult in the U.S., checks their phone 200 times per day. What it means, in concrete terms, is that if you’re a parent or an adult who is interacting with a child, that means that you have 200 potential interruptions in both relationships. So not only are there some downsides because we are modeling the use of technology to our young children, but more importantly a child understands that this device, this technology, might be more important than they are if a parent or adult caregiver or guardian is looking at their phone instead of prioritizing that human connection with a young child.
There is a scientific word for this that one of my colleagues has coined, called techno-ference, where technology interferes with relationships.
In the book, you frame “relational intelligence” as the foundation of children’s healthy development and eventual success. Can you define relational intelligence and talk about why it is so essential for young children and even adults to have?
The way I define relational intelligence is fairly simple, actually. It’s the human’s ability to understand, and navigate effectively, our relationships with other humans. We know from a lot of the research that I explained in the book — this entire body of the science of relationships — that our brain development is very much driven by healthy, nurturing relationships. So essentially, brains are bigger or smaller depending on nurturing relationships.
My kids are so tired of hearing me speak about this, but these orphanages in Romania were a really horrific setting where we have learned about the impact of relational deprivation. (Research) has shown that brains are meaningfully smaller and less active as a result of a lack of healthy, nurturing relationships — not by a little bit, but by almost 10 percent for those children who are left behind in orphanages relative to those who are adopted. So it’s a meaningful difference. The other thing I think is very interesting from research is that the longer a child stays in that orphanage, the smaller the brain is.
What can parents and primary caregivers, but also educators and school leaders, do in today’s environment to promote social connection and relational intelligence?
So for parents, I have a tagline: More family time to relational time. Super easy concept, and you say, ‘Oh, this is very obvious,’ but that’s the vision: how to make family time relational time.
In very concrete terms, what it means is prioritizing very, very precious times, such as dinners, without any device. So during dinner time, devices can be put in a nice little basket and there could be a little ceremony around it or fun things around the activity, but no devices around that very precious time when, typically, families are together.
Another one that I like in my own household is bedtime. So certainly for story reading, but also as children start getting a little bit older, that time when a child goes to bed is also very special. In my own household, we actually switch off the lights, and for some reason I get more information about my children’s day then than at any other point during the day.
What I’m saying is that those recommendations are very simple. They are essentially about prioritizing those very special times and making them uninterrupted by technology. I’m not saying that we should live in a technology-free society either, just finding spaces where we are prioritizing human relationships and especially young families — so play, uninterrupted windows, and remembering that quality is much more important than quantity in those interactions.
In schools or preschools or early childhood environments, what I would love to see is those schools become what I call relational hubs, and what I mean by this is most teachers that I know are in that profession because they love relationships. Most teachers that I’ve ever met — and over the years, I have met so many amazing teachers — they are in that profession just for that reason. So how can we ensure that all the administrative tasks and all the other things that get in the way are minimized so that teachers can actually focus on building those relationships with the little ones?
So that’s one piece. The other piece is ensuring that these learning environments are also very friendly to parents and the community. I understand that we have some safety protocols that need to be preserved, but how can we ensure that all these circles of relationships around young children are prioritized?
And then last but not least, and just to come back to the earlier conversation, prioritizing play in those early learning settings. It can be guided play, which has a lot of benefits, but I also mean free play, where we know that children actually are developing a lot of skills, including a lot of their relational skills, meaning establishing friendships and understanding social boundaries with others.
Tell me about junk tech and its parallels to junk food. How is junk tech interrupting healthy development for kids?
At a high level, technology is a tool. It can be good or bad, and a lot of it is bad. This is what I call junk tech. Junk tech is very similar to junk food, so any one of us can have a bag of chips and enjoy it, but ideally we don’t eat those bags of chips too often and maybe not multiple times a day. It’s very similar for tech. Ideally, we can have a little bit of junk tech — all these media communications that are very addictive (and low quality), not dissimilar to a bag of chips. We can have a little bit of it, but ideally we don’t have only this as part of our technology diet.
I would love to see more of an understanding of what I call in the book ‘relational tech,’ so technology that actually is beneficial and connects us to each other. There are lots of examples of these technology tools — not enough, maybe. I think it’s data from Common Sense Media and from (Temple University psychology professor) Kathy Hirsh-Pasek that have shown that only a small minority of all educational apps for children are relational. But more and more, if we could evolve the use of technology toward those relational tech concepts, this would be very beneficial, very similar to a human food diet. If we can evolve from junk food to more healthy food as part of a balanced diet, that’s the ideal.
So it’s a very easy concept. The problem is that we don’t have the tools at the moment, as parents, as educators, as a broad public, to understand what we are ‘eating,’ if you like, from a technology perspective, what we’re consuming.
We don’t have the equivalent of, you know, nutrition labels on food, which have made a lot of progress. It’s maybe not enough. It may be imperfect. But at least we’ve made a lot of progress. So when I take a bag of cereal, I can see how many calories I’m eating and what type of sugar content it has and all these things. It’s very easy to understand. As a consumer in technology, that is not the same. It’s very difficult for any one of us to understand whether this so-called educational app is beneficial or not for our children or for ourselves. There are some tools, Common Sense Media being one of them, with their ratings, but they are not integrated with big platforms like Apple, so there are lots of limitations. I think that the food industry has done a much better job. There is a lot more we can do on the technology front.
You say in the book that you think, optimistically, of the next generation as Gen R. Tell me what “Gen R” means to you and why you feel hopeful about it.
We all know about Gen Z and Millennials. The new upcoming generation, the youngest little ones, do not have a real name as a generation. Some people have been calling them Gen A (for Generation Alpha), to follow on Gen Z, alphabetically. There has been another more negative one, which is Gen C — C being for Covid, which I don’t like, and I think that most people would agree. I would love to take a more hopeful take on it, and that’s why I’m proposing Gen R, for Generation of Relationships. It’s more aspirational about how this new generation can really take on this major societal issue of isolation.
I was just looking, actually, at a small piece of data — and this is more for high schoolers, so a little bit older, but it gave me a lot of hope about Gen R. There has been a quadrupling since the pandemic of use of board games, so things like chess and other board games that people actually play physically. I’m not speaking about online ones. I’m speaking about physical activities. That’s just, to me, a little signal — there are many others, but this one is a very, very nice one — that this new generation also wants to connect with others.
I strongly believe that we’re in an epidemic of loneliness, but I think there are some signals that are hopeful about this new generation, that they want to connect with each other.
