One day, my daughter, Ellen, came home from school. She was in third grade. And the minute we closed the front door, she literally just started sobbing and slid down the door until she was just kind of a heap of crying on the floor. And of course I was … It scared me, and I said, “What’s wrong Ellen? What happened? What happened?”

And she pulled herself together enough to say, “Something really hard happened to me today at school, and I shared it with a couple of my friends during recess. And by the time we got back into the classroom, everyone in my class knew what had happened, and they were laughing and pointing at me and calling me names.” And it was so bad, and the kids were being so disruptive, that her teacher even had to take marbles out of this marble jar.

And the marble jar in the classroom is a jar where if the kids are making great choices together, the teacher adds marbles. If they’re making not great choices, the teacher takes out marbles. And if the jar gets filled up, there’s a celebration for the class.

And so, she said, “It was one of the worst moments in my life. They were laughing and pointing. And Miss Bacchum, my teacher, kept saying, ‘I’m going to take marbles out.’ And she didn’t know what was happening.”

And she looked at me just with this face that is just seared my mind and said, “I will never trust anyone again.” And my first reaction, to be really honest with you, was, “Damn straight, you don’t tell anybody anything but your Mama.”

Yeah, right? That’s it. I mean, that was my … “You just tell me. And when you grow up and you go off to school, Mama will go too. I’ll get a little apartment.” And the other thing I was thinking to be quite honest with you is, “I will find out who those kids were.” And while I’m not going to beat up a nine year old, I know their mamas.

You know, that’s the place you go to. And I’m like, “How am I going to explain trust to this third grader in front of me?” So I took a deep breath and I said, “Ellen, trust is like a marble jar.” She said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “You share those hard stories and those hard things that are happening to you with friends, who, over time, you filled up their marble jar. They’ve done thing after thing after thing where you’re like, ‘I know I can share this with this person.’ Does that make sense?”

Yes!

And that’s what Ellen said, “Yes, that makes sense.” And I said, “Do you have any marble jar friends?” And she said, “Oh yeah. Totally. Hannah and Lorna are marble jar friends.” And I said … And then this is where things got interesting. I said, “Tell me what you mean. How do they earn marbles for you?”

And she’s like, “Well, Lorna, if there’s not a seat for me at the lunch cafeteria, she’ll scoot over and give me half a heinie seat.” And I’m like, “She will?” She’s like, “Yeah. She’ll just sit like that, and so I can sit with her.” And I said, “That’s a big deal.” This is not what I was expecting to hear.

And then she said, “And you know Hannah, on Sunday at my soccer game?” And I was waiting for this story where she said, “I got hit by a ball and I was laying on the field, and Hannah picked me up and ran me to first aid.” And I was like, “Yeah?” And she said, “Hannah looked over and she saw Oma and Opa,” my parents, her grandparents, “And she said, ‘Look, your Oma and Opa are here.'” And I was like …

And I was like, “Boy, she got a marble for that?” And she goes, “Well, you know, not all my friends have eight grandparents.” Because my parents are divorced and remarried, my husband’s parents were divorced and remarried. And she said, “And it was so nice to me that she remembered their names.”

And I was like, “Hmm.” And she said, “Do you have marble jar friends?” And I said, “Yeah, I do have a couple of marble jar friends.” And she said, “Well, what kind of things do they do to get marbles?” And this feeling came over me. And I thought … The first thing I could think of, because we were talking about the soccer game, was that same game. My good friend Eileen walked up to my parents and said, “Diane, David, good to see you.” And I remember what that felt like for me. And I was like, certainly, trust cannot be built by these small insignificant moments in our lives. It’s gotta be a grander gesture than that.

So, as a researcher, I start looking into the data. I gather up the doctoral students who’ve worked with me. We start looking. And it is crystal clear. Trust is built in very small moments. And when we started looking at examples of when people talked about trust in the research, they said things like, “Yeah, I really trust my boss. She even asked me how my mom’s chemotherapy was going.” “I trust my neighbor because if something’s going on with my kid, it doesn’t matter what she’s doing, she’ll come over and help me figure it out.” You know, one of the number one things emerged around trust and small things? People who attend funerals. “This is someone who showed up at my sister’s funeral.”