This is an interview with Dr Junlei Li, the Saul Zaentz senior lecturer in early childhood education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Junlei’s work emphasises developmental relationships as the ‘active ingredient’ for children and young people to thrive. As he points out in this recent Zero to Three article a disproportionate valuing of material resources, particularly in impoverished neighbourhoods and parts of the world, risks undermining the essential human elements of human interactions.

Junlei’s research in a range of low resource but high quality developmental settings, including orphanages and classrooms, led to the development of the Simple Interactions approach. In essence Simple Interactions recognises and builds on what people in difficult circumstances do naturally well.

The interview also covers: Developmental relationships and attachment, the concepts of ‘positive deviance’ and ‘deep and simple’ (with reference to Mister Rogers!), some thoughts on the covid-19 pandemic and the related risk of misinformation overload.

You can learn more about Junlei's work here:

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/junlei-li

And find more about the Simple Interactions approach here: https://www.simpleinteractions.org/

The music on this podcast comes from a mental health awareness track by one of our HELP University first year students and can be heard in full here.  Thanks Eugene.