“You can learn a lot more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation,” Plato once said .
It’s a quote Howard Stevenson recently recounted when he talked about a program aimed at teaching Philadelphia youth conflict-resolution strategies, both on and off the court. This October, he and fellow Graduate School of Education professor Duane Thomas will be expanding the iniative.
Since its inception in 1998, the PLAAY (Preventing Long-Term Anger and Aggression in Youth) program has helped students at a West Philadelphia discipline school and other community agencies throughout the city practice settling disputes nonviolently. It introduces effective conflict-resolution strategies in the context of basketball games.
Partnering with the Marian Anderson Recreation Center, Stevenson and Thomas are revamping the program this year to include Peacemakers, which aims to incorporate parents more in the process.
The new PLAAY program will now encompass basketball intervention and group therapy sessions on weekends, along with additional training for parents, coaches and students during the week.
“Parents are the missing links in a lot of ways and have been undertapped,” Stevenson said. “Children of all ages want to know whether parents are watching what they do, and I can think of few situations besides sports in which you really want to know if your parents are watching you.
“It isn’t about talent, it’s more ‘can you see me do my thing.’”
He added that talking about sporting experiences frequently provides excellent opportunities for parents and children to bond.
“It makes a lot of sense from a developmental perspective — if a child is demoralized or dispirited, a comforting touch or words of encouragement from a parent can go a long way,” Thomas said.
The Peacemakers program will help parents develop the skills necessary to act as “emotional coaches” and work alongside the program’s instructors in a collaborative partnership.
To accomplish this, the program will train community workers to conduct structured observations of parents throughout games and practices so they can receive immediate feedback.
Coaches will also train parents in identifying conflicts before they erupt during games.
“It’s amazing how many signs there are before a conflict happens,” Stevenson said, referring to past games he has reviewed on videotape. “We can teach parents how to look for these signs.”
In addition, Peacemakers will provide parents with training in racial and cultural negotiations, which involves exploring such topics as rejection management.
“We want to speak to issues within different communities, but we also want to talk about real street-life survival-type issues that youth in South Philadelphia as well as their parents confront on a daily basis,” Thomas said.
“We want to teach youth as well as parents how to solve these problems, whether we’re talking about racial, academic or gender conflicts, whether in the classrooms or in the broader community.”
