Conflict is a natural part of life as we all have different experiences, opinions and thoughts that don’t always mesh when we interact, Take Ten Director Ellen Kyes said.
“Conflict is a totally normal part of life,” Kyes said at Indiana Youth Institute Youth Worker Cafe event at Dunebrook recently in Valparaiso. “Having conflict is not the problem; Resolving it and dealing with it is what we have to focus on. Since we’re all going to encounter it, we all need some tools to figure it out.”
Take Ten, which has been in existence for 17 years, focuses on helping youth and adults to take the time to count to 10 and refocus on fixing the situation. The program is named for one of its methods: “talk it out, walk it out and wait it out.” Students are advised to take 10 deep breaths, take 10 steps back and 10 seconds to calm down rather than engaging in violent and hurtful behavior. Take Ten started at the University of Notre Dame. It’s been taught to children as young as kindergartners as well as men about to emerge from prison.
“Of all my adult students, they are usually the most engaged, which I think is interesting,” Kyes said. “But a lot of them absolutely get the fact that this stuff and their inability to act the way we teach led to where they are now. A lot of them have spent some reflective time looking back on ‘why I am where I am.'”
The Take Ten program has been instituted as part of school curricula, after-school programs and parts of restorative justice and peer mentoring programs. Volunteers teach students skills through skits, games and activities that help them resolve conflict, prevent bullying and make more peaceful choices in general.
Kyes said our natural tendencies don’t lend themselves to resolving problems in a calm and peaceful manner.
“One of the places we talk about in the continuum of behavior, where passive is at one end and aggression is at the other, is we don’t want to be at either end,” Kyes said. “We want to be in that middle place and be assertive. It’s like a teeter-totter. If you want to go step out in the middle and keep that puppy balanced, that’s not an easy place. It’s that middle ground of saying what’s on your mind in a respectful way, but not getting loud or in somebody’s face about it.”
Expanding the program to adults grew out of feedback from children who had gone through the program.
“We were evaluating the younger kids and a couple of the questions were along the lines of ‘it’s OK to hit someone who hits me first’ (on a) scale of strongly agree down to strongly disagree,” Kyes said. “When you get to that question, because the younger kids are circling responses, they’re circling strongly agree as hard as their little pencils will circle; they are ‘Amen’-ing you out loud. That happened so many times that we started going back to some of those rooms; We knew that we had taught them a far different answer, we knew that their teachers had taught them something different, but yet that’s their really strong answer.
“What did they say? Those are the expectations that mom and dad set. If that kid gets in your face, you better hit back on him. I heard kid after kid come back with that. So we started working with grown-ups because to really make a difference you’ve got to teach the grown-ups what the kids are learning.”
For more information, check out taketen.nd.edu.
