Repair is Where Children Grow

Transcription: Repair is Where Children Grow

Discipline, Consequences and the Power of Repair

Helping Children Learn From Mistakes

I want to talk about discipline and punishments, and choice and consequence. And I know I’ve spoken about it before, but it’s such an important component of children’s growth.

If we think about how we are going to get children to learn from their mistakes, that’s the angle that I want to take when it comes to teaching and moving kids forward and developing them, rather than this idea of, if I shout at you, that will scare you into not doing it again.

Because we’ve got to think of children as forward-moving beings, who engage and participate in life in order to learn, grow and develop. Some children take one time to learn what they should and shouldn’t do, and other children seemingly take forever, and they take multiple times. And it’s the same lesson over and over to build understanding and move forward in their learning and abilities.

Making Space for Responsibility

But how do we help children to move forward in their ability and in the development of their character, in their willingness to right wrongs, in their ability to take responsibility for what they’ve done?

We make space for that.

As soon as we shut down the room for being wrong, the space for being wrong, then they’re more afraid of being wrong than they are of trying new things. And they’re more afraid of being found out than they are of fixing their mistakes.

As a school, we use the simple concept of responsibility, which is broken into choice and consequence. And as far as possible, the consequence of your choice is quick, immediate, linked to what you’ve done, commensurate. I think that’s quite a nice word.

If you kick a ball and it breaks a window, you haven’t, I don’t believe, for the most part, that your intention was to break the window. And even if it was to break the window, the result is, “Oh dear, okay, well, I need you to tidy up the glass. And if you don’t know how to do it or you’re too young, I’m absolutely going to be there showing you how to keep yourself safe and what tools to use and how to do it the correct way, or the most efficient way and the safest way.”

And then I want to say, “Here we go, in a bag, here’s the broken glass. Give it to your mom and dad, and one weekend you can come and replace the window.”

The Natural Consequence of a Choice

That is such a beautiful, natural outcome of breaking a window, is that you get to fix it.

Now, where parents often get this so catastrophically wrong is that they feel like, when I hand them the bag of glass, they feel ashamed and embarrassed, and they want to very quickly repair the window themselves or pay for it to get done, or they ignore me and never get it done.

In that huge avoidance, all it does is it tells the child, “When you do something wrong, and someone tries to hold you accountable, never mind my boy, I’ll do it. You don’t have to worry about fixing your wrongs.”

And this empowers a child and sends the message that there are no consequences for their actions.

Now, when your child is five years old and they break a window and there’s no consequences, even if the consequence is, “You got to come with me to the shops and you handle it, right? And then you got to come with me to school on Saturday and I’ll handle it, and you can just watch me,” because at that stage maybe that’s the level that they’re at.

If they can’t take accountability there, how on earth are you going to expect them to take accountability when they’re in their 20s, and they have a car accident, or they hurt someone by mistake, or they fail a big exam?

They will have had no practice and no experience of, “Oops, I made a mistake, but don’t worry, I can figure this out and someone can help me, and I can get this done, and I can repair.”

Teaching Children How to Repair

As parents, the repair work when you make a mistake is where your work lies.

It also lies in: when they make a mistake, what repair are you asking your child to do? And in that repair process, can you teach them a lesson? Can you teach them how to replace a window? Can you teach them how to do some chores to earn some pocket money so they can go to the shops to replace the glass that they dropped and broke?

How can you get them to reasonably fix their mistake? Because the understanding is that the mistake is just a mistake.

And as I said in the beginning, even if it was deliberate, the break was there. How do you repair the break?

We use Prestik a lot for children when it comes to fidget toys, and when they’re frustrated, because they get to break the Prestik apart, but they get to push it back together. They understand that they can repair it rather than tearing pieces of paper that are harder to put together.

So we want to create the cycle of “Oops, I made a mistake, but I can fix the mistake.”

So this also goes to, “I got the sum wrong, but that’s fine. I can practise the sum and get it right next time.”

“Oh, I only got two out of 10 for my spelling test. What can I do differently next time to get four or five or six out of 10?”

So there’s this understanding in the child, this perpetual cycle of, “If I make a mistake, no matter what it is, there’s always a way to fix the mistake, to repair, to grow and develop and build a skill and make connection with my adults,” rather than, “I break the window and I break connection with my secure adults as well.”

So we need to be really careful about the message that we give children.

Why Choices Matter

Because there’s another thing to this as well. It’s, “I break the window, I break the connection with my adult,” or, “I break the window, and it doesn’t change the connection at all because Mom or the school just come and sort it out without me.”

So either way, I’m learning that what I do doesn’t matter, and that’s a real self-esteem thing.

I think whatever children do matters.

Now let’s think of it in terms of a positive thing because choice and consequence isn’t a negative concept. It’s just an overall concept.

So if you make a choice to study and you study hard and you put effort in and you get eight out of 10 instead of two out of 10, what’s the natural consequence of that?

Well, you get eight out of 10. You get more ticks on your page. Perhaps you feel good about yourself. Perhaps the teacher says, “You’re the best in the class. Well done. Let’s give you a round of applause.”

Or maybe you win the class prize of some sort. Maybe you get some great pats on the back.

The point is you don’t get more connection because you did well, and less connection because you did something bad or you did poorly. That’s not the goal.

The goal of connection is always there. Consequence is appropriate to the action.

Focusing on Positive Choices

So when we get kids coming into our environment who have behaviours that are, or seem to be, negative, what we want to do is give them natural consequences for their choices, but not excessive ones. Just natural consequences to their choices.

And then we all make negative choices, and we want to focus on all the positive choices they make and really look hard for those.

Did they stop themselves from hitting the other kid?

“Well done. Great choice. You stopped yourself from hitting that kid. I’m very impressed with you. I’d love to give you a hug.”

Or, “Shall we choose something nice to do at break?” Or whatever the consequence might be.

Or just a simple consequence of, “Look, that kid now wants to be your friend.” That’s the outcome of you being nice to that child or that friend or whatever it might be.

So we’ve got to look at all the choices a child makes consistently. And I would say you need to pick up at least 30% of them, both positive and negative. It doesn’t have to be all of them.

Definitely look for the ones they’re looking at you for. They do something. They look to see, are you noticing?

You want to see why they’re looking to make sure you’re noticing, of course, but you want to be balanced, especially when a child seemingly has so many behaviours we see as negative.

You want to be focusing on the positive.

So when they don’t spit at you, “I’m so impressed that you stopped yourself. Thank you. I like that part of you. I appreciate that you got to stop yourself. Well done. I can see that was hard.”

What a wonderful thing to hear.

And the next time they might spit on you, go, “Oh, that’s a choice you made. Okay, I think we need to clean this up. Should we get some water? We need to get a tissue to wipe it off my shoe. I think you can help me with that.”

And even if they don’t, even if they run away, you didn’t shout. You just gave them an opportunity to notice because awareness is where change happens.

Awareness Creates Change

Change never happens without awareness first.

And if we make awareness hard for somebody, something that they want to avoid, they will never change. We’ve got to make awareness safe for them to pursue.

And I don’t mean safe as in we do it for them. I mean safe as in, “It’s okay. I’m here. We’ll do it together. But I’m not doing it for you because I didn’t break the ruler. I didn’t break the window. I didn’t spoil the lunch.”

The Power of Community and Connection

But what I see in our environment, which is quite remarkable because we work really hard to provide or create a safe, loving, kind, in particular kind environment.

There was a little boy the other day who opened his lunchbox upside down, and his lunch, all of his lunch, just dropped all over the mud. It was just gone. It was a mess.

And he looked down at it, and as he looked up, at least three, four, five of his friends were already there trying to save some of his fruit, offering him some of their food.

The consequence of dropping your food was that you lost your food. The consequence of building relationships with your friends is that they come to your aid.

Isn’t that such a wonderful thing?

And we get to prove to children over and over and over again that their choices matter.

And the consequence will always have support and connection attached to it. It will never have pushing them out of the circle and isolating. We’ll never do that if they do something that we think is wrong.

Repair Is Where the Healing Happens

Beyond basic laws and rules, it’s a matter of opinion whether it’s right or wrong.

And breaking the window is not wrong. It’s a frustrating thing. It’s an inconvenient thing. It could even be expensive. But it’s not wrong. It’s just a thing that happened.

And repair is where the healing happens.

And I would say the same thing for adults. You can make mistakes.

The stats are this: 30%. You only need to get 30% right in order to be deemed a good parent. How about that?

And I mean deemed a good parent, not by any other external measure, but by the relationship you have with your child.

But the key is, when you get something wrong, do you recover? Do you say sorry? Do you repair? Do you role model how to handle mistakes?

And that’s how we turn children who are struggling learners and who are neurodiverse and struggling in their neurodiversity. That’s how we make room for them to breathe. And we make room for them to be who they are and to seemingly make mistakes.

Because actually, there are no mistakes. There are just social norms, and then children who act outside of those typical norms.

But we give them room to be human. We give all people room to be human.

Because repair is where the healing happens.

And it’s a beautiful thing.