Child/adult interactions are special and powerful – and don’t get the attention that they deserve.

Junlei Li is working to change that with Simple Interactions, an initiative that seeks to “encourage, enrich, and empower human interactions around children and their helpers.”

As we’ve blogged, Li was the co-director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College. Now he’s the Saul Zaentz senior lecturer in early childhood education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE).

Li “developed the ‘Simple Interactions’ approach to help identify what ordinary people do extraordinarily well with children in everyday moments and made that the basis for promoting positive system change,” his HGSE website says.

These child/adult interactions can occur in a range of settings, from early childhood and K-12 classrooms to afterschool programs and pediatric hospitals.

Li draws inspiration for his work from Fred Rogers, the famous children’s television show host of “Mister Rogers Neighborhood,” who left an indelible mark on generations of young viewers.

Rogers advocated for the importance of children having “a foundation of growing on the inside, even more so than learning their letters and learning to count,” Li explains in this Harvard EdCast interview.

“Fred Rogers’ motto for his own work was ‘deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.’ ” Li says in a Harvard Ed. Magazine interview. This made Li wonder, “What is deep and simple about each of us who are passionate to make gentle the life of this world for children, families, and communities? We can always remind ourselves, and those around us, to look for the deep and simple amid all the shallow and complex that surrounds us.”

To encourage better child/adult interactions, Li has developed a Simple Interactions tool that highlights “the four dimensions of developmental interactions: Connection, Reciprocity, Inclusion, and Opportunity to Grow.” The tool has four simple — not surprisingly — illustrations of what each of the four dimensions should look like.

Li’s work also includes training those who work with children and sharing these ideas with providers. At the early childhood level, this includes workshops and other forms of professional development including coaching and technical assistance.

To help adults improve early childhood settings, Li adds in the EdCast interview (at the 13:44 time mark), be careful with the “really high standards you have in your mind” about these settings because then “all you can see is all the ways that this place has fallen below the standards that you have in your head.”

“The other choice is the approach that we’ve learned from Mr. Rogers, to be a helpful appreciator,” someone who can see and reflect back to an early educator the strengths of an early childhood setting. It’s a Simple Interaction that can happen between adults, and it can be a much more efficient way of improving quality than being “a helpful critic,” an approach of focusing on the negative that Li admits he had used but eventually gave up.

All these efforts have a central goal of asking whether “our practices, programs, and policies are evolving to ‘encourage, enrich, and empower the relationships and daily interactions between children and their helpers, as well as between caregivers (parents, teachers) and those who support the work of early childhood (coaches, trainers)?’ ” the Simple Interactions website says.

Li’s vision of the future?

“I hope, in five years’ time, or however long it takes, that early childhood as a system, as a field, [will] start to really respect and honor and support the helpers in children’s lives,” he says (at the 18:14 EdCast time mark). “We cannot make a sustainable impact on children by skipping over the adults in the middle.”

“To be successful we have to help the helpers,” including parents, grandparents, child care providers, early education professionals. Society also has to “truly believe both the science, as well as our lived experience, that we learn and grow best through human relationships. Then as a system, we have to invest in the sources of these human relationships. And for a young child, these relationships come from their helpers.”