From Partner Dance to Social Emotional Development

As a developmental psychologist, I spent 5 years of my PhD life playing with hundreds and hundreds of babies to understand how tiny people make sense of the world. How do they pick up languages? What information helps them to quantify physical entities? What are the facilitators and barriers for a baby’s reasoning? One thing I learned from studying hundreds of babies in half a decade is - these tiny little humans learn FAST!

After my Ph.D., I moved from academia to a nonprofit where we leveraged technology-based solutions to support emotional well-being and resilience in teens and young adults. I worked with young adults who were experiencing adversities, from first-time, low-income mothers to young cancer survivors. The goal was to create technology that was designed to change their behaviors and then to better their quality of lives. One thing I learned from working with human version 2.0 is - behavioral change in later development is DIFFICULT!

I experience this difficulty in my adulthood learning. After I started my first job outside academia, I started having the ability to indulge my has-been-long-overdue love: ballroom dancing. As time went by, my commitment moved from two 1-hour class a week to 10-hour practice a week as I started competing. As a lifelong learner and a researcher who studies how kids learn, I know that learning requires practice. But only after I started competing, which means intense practice is required, not optional. I realized what practice encompasses in partner dancing. When you acquire a new skill, you practice with repetition, you practice over and over and you make changes to get closer to the desired outcomes. Most of the time, you are the sole human being in you own practice. In partner dancing, you also practice with repetition and make changes to get closer to the desired outcome; however, you do this with another human being and the desired outcomes are based on mutual agreement. Your practice involves another person; your adjustment needs to take another person’s point of view into consideration; the repetitive practice means countless coordination and communication with another person.

Imagine this: you are physically connected with another person the moment you step on the dance floor, every second, every millisecond until the music stops. It is like co-driving a car with another individual where you control the steering wheel and your partner controls the accelerator and the break. While you need to communicate with your partner on what’s on the street constantly and clearly (from your partner’s point of view), and manage your emotional state during the process, you also need to listen carefully to your partner and adjust your guidance based on what you perceive from your partner’s control of the accelerator and the break. Sounds extremely challenging, right? It IS!

As humans, our default is to see the world and interact with the world from our own perspectives. The ability to understand that others could have beliefs and perspectives different from our own and to be able to take that into consideration requires a lot of effort. In the world of competitive ballroom dancing, lots of kids start their “career” very early on. You see kids at 5 or 6 years of age, dancing with their little partner, with discipline, dedication and careful coordination with another person before they can even clearly express themselves all the time. As a developmental psychologist and a ballroom dancer, I can’t stop asking - what impact does this synchronous interpersonal activities have on these kids’ social emotional development? Can engaging with another human early in life in a manner that requires dedication, collaboration, and communication improve a child’s social emotional development? Identifying such a mechanism and scaling it up through a more systematic manner could be a powerful vehicle to better our future generations.

That’s where the story begins. As a scientist at day and a ballroom dancer at night, I have started looking into the potential of early engagement of interpersonal movements on the development of social emotional learning. I will share my findings from scientific research and my learnings from the dance floor with you here. Stay tuned!