Icebreakers Without Injury: Rethinking Name Games
As a therapist, coach, camp counselor, and professional trainer, I love a good icebreaker. They can be fun and playful, or reflective and thoughtful. They are great ways to learn a lot about people, quickly. Unless you accidentally shut people down by bringing up issues that are tied to deep losses they have experienced, or big changes they experienced. Then they kind of defeat the purpose.
A few years ago I was a parent at a back-to-school night at my child’s school. This was during those distant times when it was safe for parents to mingle, and getting to know one another in the same physical space was encouraged.
Let’s all pause and imagine that for a minute……..Ahhhhhh…….Anyway- the school staff had thoughtfully planned some activities. Parents were walking around the room musical-chairs style and then stopping in front of someone new, and waiting for question prompts to answer together. The music stopped and I was face-to-face with someone I hadn’t yet met. The teacher read out the question, “Tell the story of how you chose your child’s name.”
You can imagine that for most parents in the room this question brings a smile and a nod to a moment when their family was imagining possibilities. Maybe they poured through generations of family names. Or argued playfully as a couple because one partner’s suggested name rhymed with ____________, and that could never work. For many people, this question is a thoughtful “innocent” one.
Yet for many kids and families, this is a charged and sometimes painful issue. For adoptees and their families the issue of naming power and choice is a complex one. Not all adoptive parents choose their child names or know the origins of their child’s name. Many adoptive parents deliberated intensely about whether or not to change their child’s name when they had the legal right to do so. Some parents swiftly change an adoptee’s given name at the time of adoption, and many adoptees have shared that this is a painful practice that should be reconsidered.
If adoptees are in classes, in groups, on teams, or at training, consider that they may not know the origin story of their name. Or they know they had a given name that they lost when their whole world changed. Many adoptees crave “blending in” and these exercises remind them that they are different. For some people, that isn’t a huge deal. For others, it is a source of real sadness. Evoking feelings of sadness and loss isn’t usually supposed to be part of icebreakers.
While we are talking about it, name-origin stories are also tricky for transgender youth. For many transgender youths, their chosen names are not the names their families gave them at birth, (or the names that their adoptive parents may have given them later). Part of exploring gender identity is exploring and finding a name that aligns with a person’s internal felt sense of gender. Some non-binary and transgender youth never change their names. Many find an alternate name that better captures their femininity, masculinity, or gender neutrality. Asking parents or children in this situation the origins of the name a child is using can be an unintentionally very intimate question to ask. Harm can accidentally be done.
The good news is that there are many ways to get to know people with whom you are sharing space. Ask them about their favorite colors. Or a favorite object or toy. Have people describe themselves using two of the letters in their names. Ask if they could be any animal of their choice, which would it be, and why?
I made it through that parent night exercise, but it was awkward for me and the person on the other side of that exercise. And I am an adult! I imagined my child trying to navigate that same situation, and I keep talking to coaches and school personnel when I can. Keeping adoptees, and transgender kids, in mind helps us all be intentional in the way we create safe spaces for each other to live and learn.
