CMMI CosmoKidz Expansion to 8-15 Year Olds

The Coordinated Management of Meaning Institute (CMMI) is asking for help:

“We created CosmoKidz as one way to help young children develop relational awareness and skills. By now, we have more than four years’ worth of research to confirm what we thought: It works!

CosmoKidz only covers the age group from 4-7 year olds and now we want to go beyond. We imagine creating something for the 8-11 year olds—CosmoTweenz—and for the 12-15 year olds— CosmoTeenz. The social challenges for each of these age groups will most probably vary, and we need their own words, stories, experiences to describe what they are struggling with in their social world. This is where we need your help!

If you are close to children/young people in these age groups, either as a parent, friend, relative, or in a professional manner, and you’d like to offer ideas we’d love to hear from you. If you see this as an opportunity to work collaboratively with us we’d also love to hear from you. Our next steps offer some exciting research opportunities as well as significant opportunities for developing new teaching aids.

We want to follow the same initial procedure we used for CosmoKidz and involve various groups of young people to support us in creating the actual aids. To start this off we need to hear their stories, in their own words. We particularly would love to hear their responses to:

What effects do you think social media has on your friendships? …. on how you feel about yourself?
What other situations in your social life and making friendships may you find difficult to deal with? Or if you are ok, maybe you have friends who struggle in their relationships or at school? Can you give examples of such situations?
What do you think make such situations and issues difficult to handle?
How do you think relationships could be made better?
What tasks/exercises do you think would increase you and your friends’ awareness and ability to act with compassion and courage amid these challenges?

If you can help in any way, or want to find out more, contact Robyn Penman before the end of May, 2018. We truly appreciate every reply, small and big.”