The Village as an Emergency Response System

When children grow up, they are always observing. They gather memories and experiences that slowly form an understanding of how the world works. Some of these experiences act as mirrors, reflecting parts of themselves back to them. Other experiences act as windows, allowing them to see into lives and perspectives different from their own.

This idea was first described by educator Emily Style and later expanded by Rudine Sims Bishop, who described stories and experiences as mirrors, windows, and even sliding glass doors into other worlds.

Even now, as a grown up, you deserve to have this too. Mirrors, windows, and sliding doors invite us to step into unfamiliar realities and look around.

You deserve to see people in your village who mirror how you feel and help you understand yourself. You also deserve people who act as windows—people who encourage you to see yourself and others in different contexts, people who help you imagine who you might be in six months, five years, or even twenty-five years.

When mirrors are scarce, or when windows are treated as something unfamiliar or unsafe, the world begins to feel smaller. I am going to stay close to home with this example:

I watched my father-in-law journey through the end of his life with dementia. It happened during COVID. In the midst of that time, he spent his last days in a facility with very little contact. Experiences like this are hard not to internalize. It becomes easy to imagine yourself or someone you love facing a similar ending. Fear quietly begins to shape the picture we carry in our minds.

But the magic lies in our ability to use other experiences, and our imagination, to paint different possibilities.

We encourage children to do this all the time. If a child is afraid that a zombie might attack the house in the middle of the night, we do not stop at dismissing the fear. Instead we continue the story together. What would we do if that happened? What tools would we use? How would we keep each other safe?

Children can recognize, we can recognize, that imagination can expand a fearful story into something collaborative and creative. Fear paints powerful pictures in our minds, but imagination gives us the tools to paint new ones.

Adults often lose that habit. We tend to dismiss uncomfortable possibilities instead of exploring them. But mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors ask us to do something different. They invite us to step into unfamiliar realities and look around. They remind us that things are rarely as simple as they first appear and that possibilities are always larger than our first assumptions.

Like our children, we are noticing things long before we know how to name them. We are absorbing experiences long before they become motivations shaped by fear or hope. We learn how to process what feels unfamiliar through the people we trust in our village. Different people and different stories encourage us to dignify experiences outside our own.

Over time we begin to understand that another person’s story, history, or purpose does not threaten our own. Instead, each story adds something new to the supply chest of experiences we draw from as we make sense of ourselves.

Every story becomes another tool we can use to paint who we are, in the present, in the past, and in the future. This is why our inner circle matters so much.

It is within our inner circle that trust forms and information flows most freely. Sometimes that flow begins with something small. A friend recommends a book. That book introduces a perspective that helps you process a childhood experience in a way you never had language for before. Now you have new words. Naturally, you want to bring those words back to the people closest to you. You want to share what helped you feel more seen or more understood.

Not everyone in your inner circle will immediately be able to hold this new language, and that is okay.

In relationships that feel safe, learning is something we do together. Often we learn at different moments in time. Sometimes you learn something first and bring it back to your circle. Sometimes someone else does. When shared with curiosity, kindness, and respect, these moments deepen the bond between people.

The superpower we can give our children is not the promise that they will never feel unsafe. The superpower is teaching them what to do when they do feel unsafe.

I also want to point out something important about why this practice matters in a very practical way for all of us: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, trusted adults, siblings, friends, and children. When our inner circle is a place of safety, where curiosity is encouraged and confusion is welcomed, we are actually building an emergency response system.

This system is crucial for the safety of ourselves and our children. The same network that supports us as we grow in emotional maturity is the very same network that can protect us when something feels wrong or dangerous. Let me give an example:

Your teenage child, niece, or nephew sees something on a friend's phone at school that makes them feel unsafe or uncomfortable. In that moment, we want them to go to someone who makes them feel safe. We want them to be able to say, “I saw something today and I’m not sure what to do with it.”

From there, we can observe together. Maybe it is something that is safe enough to explore, like learning about natural disasters or something confusing they encountered online. Or maybe it is something that is not safe for them to process alone. Either way, the important thing is that the information has somewhere safe to go. But this process is rarely one-and-done.

When someone brings something to us that makes them feel unsafe, it may also make us feel unsafe.

And now we have our own process to work through. We may need to go to someone in our own inner circle who helps us feel steady so we can figure out how to respond wisely. And the process continues outward from there.

This is what a healthy village looks like in action. Information flows through circles of trust where it can be observed, understood, and responded to. The example could go in many directions, but the point remains the same.

When we build inner circles where curiosity is welcomed and confusion is safe to express, we are not just nurturing emotional growth.

We are building a living safety network. And this network may be one of the most powerful ways a village protects its children. Children who grow up in villages that hold curiosity and safety together learn something powerful: the world does not need to shrink in order for them to feel safe and secure.