Being a Design Thinking Parent

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I studied design thinking intensively for the few years before I became a Mom, so I have been thinking of how to combine the two things: parenthood and design thinking. It’s not easy when, as a parent, you are constantly faced with problems, emotions, and crises of little babies and toddlers. But when I get a chance to step back and think about how to approach the challenges of parenting with more thoughtfulness and creativity, I can see some sparks where the two domains might intersect.

Here’s one page from my notebook, as I tried to find some of these areas for overlap. As a parent, you can incorporate design thinking into how you approach playing with your kids, or how you structure your responses to problems or bad behavior.

Some of the ideas are kind of meta: have a structure as a parent, just like a designer has the basic process, but be flexible with it as long as you are staying true to the core values.

Be visual with your kids — draw and diagram out your relationships, expectation, and conversations.

Deal with mistakes with resilience and curiosity. Both as a parent, and how you respond to your kid’s mistakes. Admit things went wrong, but try to learn how to improve from it.

Figure out your cadre of essential values, that will be ‘user-centered’ and ‘goal-oriented’, so you have a north star while parenting.

These are all first draft thoughts, happy to hear from any other designer-parents out there about how they combine these two worlds.