Empathize Your Parent’s Day while Applying Systems Thinking

Family Time After Dinner

When you are done having dinner with family members. It is time to drink tea or coffee. Why don't you let your children ask you questions to understand your stress level for today.

How to Play

When tea or coffee is ready after dinner, you are going to have a back and forth conversation with family members. This game is for you! You and your children will talk about mom's and dad's stress level for today. Together, you and your children will be able to know about your stress level and come up with some ideas to find solutions.

Step 1: Time to Start the Conversation

Start letting your children asking questions while having tea or coffee after dinner.

If they have a hard time to come up with some questions. Give them some examples. For example, how was your day dad? How was your day mom?

What was the most stressful thing that happened today?

Did you have the most or less stressful time in the morning, afternoon, or evening?

Step 2: Stress Over Time Graph

Allow them to create a behavioral over time graph based on your stress level of the day, demonstrated in an hour-by-hour graph.

You can either let them use a piece of paper or whiteboard to create the behavioral over time graph.

Tell them: You will listen my day hour by hour and then point out how stress changed over time.

Let them know that they should pay attention to your answers and also encourage them to take notes.

Step 3: Let Them Identify the Reasons

Let your children identify the reasons why stresses changed during your breakfast time, work time, or traffic time.

Let them draw your stress level based on your answers.

For instance, You are so stressful because you were stuck in a traffic jam for two hours or you didn't complete the project on time at work.

Feed more questions if they have a difficult time to ask. At least 3 questions required to draw, analyze, and come up with solutions for your stressful day.

Step 4: Coming Up with Right Algorithm Design for Stressful Day

Ask your children how to solve your specific stressful issues next day?

Encourage them to give you some suggestions according to the line graph. For example, "Dad or mom, you should listen to an audiobook while driving so that you will be less stressful. Or, you should go biking instead of driving to decrease your stress level."

Instead of providing them the solution, let them solve stress problems you encountered during the day.