One of my favorite classes in college was an elective: Intro to Design. The professor told us our first assignment would teach us how to see differently. The task: we were given two weeks to find each letter of the alphabet.
 
Easy, right? No. 

The challenge was that these couldn’t be actual written or printed letters. We needed to find them formed in shapes in our surroundings, like in nature or human-made objects. We were also told that we could not manipulate things into forming the letters; they needed to be found as-is. To get full credit, we needed to produce a photograph of all 26 letters in the alphabet.
 
What this assignment taught me is that by changing what we want to notice, we change what we find. But unless we deliberately choose to, we don’t tend to examine the default lenses in which we are already viewing the world. Our lens, however, determines our choices and actions.

This has big implications for our work with families. The way that we see a child, parent, or family affects how we behave toward them. How we see people is how we treat them.