On Parenting a Spirited Child: an Essay

by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings

We walk into the school, turning the corner down toward his classroom, and I can feel the tension and sadness pulsing through his hand in mine. When I turn to him for this morning goodbye, his pupils are so large his eyes look nearly black.

By this time next week, my boy will be in a new classroom, with a new teacher, with new anxieties sitting on his chest.

Today, he will walk into his old classroom, after three days in school suspension for a mistake he made that was sorely misinterpreted, and he will sit at his old desk and he will look around at those old classmates he’s shared a room with for two years, and he will know that it is his last day here, with a teacher he loved but who no longer has the patience and stamina to handle his emotional outbursts.

This morning I can’t even make it all the way to his door because of the emotions clogging my throat, pulling tears from their unending reservoir down my cheeks, so I stop, two rooms away. The only person I see in this crowded hallway is my son, trying to breathe, trying to be brave, trying to overcome all this rejection and misunderstanding and a label that, already, sticks hard to his seven-year-old back.

I try not to let him see my tears, brushing them away quickly like I did this morning, when he showed me the note he’d written to his teacher—a picture of her in a classroom and him sitting at a desk, crying, and a thick wall between them, underlined by a few words: I will miss you.

But he feels their water trail when I bend over him and press my face to his and whisper the same words I’ve whispered in his ear every morning before dropping him off: Remember who you are. Strong. Kind. Courageous. And most of all my son.

And then I watch him walk through that classroom door for the last time, not sure how this day will go after the last sixteen.

Will he remember who he is, or will he remember who they say he is?

They are two very different things.

///

Four days ago I sat in an office with the school principal and her assistant principal to talk about the latest of my son’s conduct violations, misinterpreted from my perspective. But it joins fifteen other conduct violations—for tearing up his already-graded homework when he felt angry, signing his name as “stupid jerk” when he felt sad, and collapsing into a crying pile on the floor when he didn’t get to use the magnifying glass for his science project like everyone else in the class did—in the last twenty days. They are telling me something must be done because his classmates are afraid of him and his teacher doesn’t think she’s a good fit for him anymore and all of it is against the school’s code of conduct.

This boy has always been our spirited child, and his daddy and I have worked diligently over the years to give him the tools and space and practice to handle his big emotions, but there are days and whole weeks sometimes when those big emotions grip him and refuse to let go.

I try to tell them what we’ve learned from each of the write-up incidents, at least the four of them we’ve seen. The story, from his perspective, tells much more than those words written on a discipline violation page, but how do you argue with a school administration that sees only the bad behavior and not the boy behind them?

This last incident, the worst of them, happened when it was leaving time. He was finishing up an art project, his favorite kind of project, trying to cut out his picture before he needed to pack up. The substitute teacher, probably frustrated by his lack of obedience, tried to grab the scissors away from him, but he beat her to it, throwing them into a corner of the room. Fortunately, no classmates happened to be in this corner because they were all packing up their backpacks like they were supposed to be doing, a disaster averted. But then he ran out of the room to escape the fire of his own anger.

The sub, who had been “warned confidentially” about him, did not talk to my son about his outburst but, instead, wrote up a conduct report of her own observations and assumptions. She never considered why he might have felt the way he did or why he chose to express himself that way or what emotion might have caused a little boy to run away.

And it’s not okay—of course it’s not. Children shouldn’t throw scissors, even if they’re blunt-tipped, anywhere near other children. Children shouldn’t run from a room where a teacher is charged with keeping students safe. But kids, I believe (and psychology has begun to prove), always have a reason for what they do, and the reason is often buried so far down it has to be dragged out with skillful fingers.

Sometimes the meltdown can be prevented in the first place by a word or two about how hard it is to put down an art project when there are no minutes left for working, instead of grabbing scissors from the hands of a focused boy. It’s always worth a try.

The administrators, in the meeting, said they wanted him to stay in school suspension for three days for this latest incident, so he’ll “learn his lesson this time.” And I can’t help but wonder what this lesson is that we’re trying to teach. He is seven years old. At the depths of his heart, he doesn’t want to mishandle his emotions or scare people or spend a whole day or three of them in isolation from all the people he loves.

He slumped against me when I broke the news that he would not be returning to class just yet. He didn’t understand. I tried to help him understand.

“Your substitute teacher thought you were threatening her,” I explained.

“But I wasn’t,” he said, his eyes filling with tears.

“I think she might have misinterpreted what you were trying to do,” I said.

“She thinks I’m bad,” he said, and then I was blinking tears away.

I read the despair in his eyes that day, and I could physically feel the giving up, the hopelessness waiting around the corner. How does a kid who’s led to believe he’s the “bad kid” ever become anything but a bad kid?

The question stood between me and school administrators that day.

So I pulled him tight against me, and I held him through the words he sobbed: I just don’t understand why they don’t believe me. I didn’t do what the substitute says I did. And then I held him through all the minutes after, when big emotions shook his body quiet.

I told him that sometimes what we intend to say with our words and actions and what others interpret are two very different things, and we have to be careful about how we come across. I don’t even know if he understands this communication nuance, because he’s seven years old. And then the bell rang and it was time to leave, and his little brothers were still waiting patiently for the walk home.

But before I left, I whispered words I hoped would stay with him all day in the quiet of an isolation room: You are loved deeply. Remember who you are. You are not these mistakes, ever.

It hurt my heart to leave him in that room all by himself, but I did.

I cried all the way home.

///

Once upon a time, when I was a senior in college, I substituted for a “troubled” school district near my university. Every time I took a job, there were students the teacher warned me about. And all day long I would wait for the trouble.

It would always come.

I was quick to write up those conduct violation sheets, because I had been warned it would probably happen, and I’d been shown where they were kept, and I’d been directed how exactly to fill them out.

I know now that those problems probably came because the kids knew I was watching, since someone was always watching. They knew I was waiting, because someone was always waiting. They knew that whatever they did they wouldn’t be able to win—my word against theirs, no matter their intent.

When you believe a kid is a problem, all you’ll ever see is the problem.

I wish I could go back to all those kids I sent to the office with a condemnation sheet in their hands. I wish I could tell them, You are more than this problem they warned me about. I believe you can do better. And I am not waiting for you to fail. I am waiting for an opportunity to help you succeed.

I feel sad that my young son is that kid, but being on this side of it helps me to see that they weren’t just “problem kids” like we teachers were trained to believe. They are not problems to be solved. They are little precious people crying out for help because of emotions and circumstances too big for them to understand and talk about.

That doesn’t mean that what they do to communicate their plea for help is right. But it does mean that we, the adults, have a responsibility: to become a child and see from their perspective and always assume good intent, because sometimes what we see a child doing and what they think they’re doing are not the same thing.

I wish I had known this back then. I wonder how it might have changed the lives of those “problem” kids.

///

My boy has been through a lot in his short seven-year life.

There was a sister-death when he was four. There was a twin pregnancy, a few months later, when a mama was in and out of hospitals and doctors’ offices because we thought we’d lost them and we hadn’t and we thought we’d lost them again and we hadn’t, and then they were finally here, and they spent twenty days in the neonatal intensive care unit, and a mama and daddy left boys with a rotating babysitter every night so we could spend two hours with the tiny babies who needed us in that short window of time. And then those twins came home, and I don’t think any of us even remember the whole first year of the twins’ life, because everything blurred into chaotic oblivion.

In the middle of that chaotic year he started school. It was a brand new environment not so different from home in terms of noise and bodies, but also widely different because there were twenty-four other students a boy could get lost behind. My best guess is it was overwhelming, overstimulating, and, perhaps, somewhat unbearable for a boy who valued working on his own in a quiet space.

His actions said what he could not say: Help me. Help me process what I’m feeling. Help me feel understood. Help me know what to do with these overwhelming emotions. And no one in those classes would listen, because they were there to learn, not to heal, and a boy, five years old, built up his armor so efficiently nothing could penetrate it.

Which brings us here, to a place where a boy’s armor is starting to crack. This boy doesn’t know how to deal with those pieces he’s hidden for so long, pieces that are leaking out faster than he can patch the hole.

This is the reality that isn’t shown on a conduct violation sheet.

When I started my parenting journey, I never thought I would be the parent of a child who had trouble in school, a child who is brilliant beyond his age and gets all the right grades, a child who is a minefield of emotions.

I probably should have.

I was a kid who preferred a room of five or six to a room of twenty-four. I was a teenager who preferred staying home to read Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice and Doctor Zhivago out back in the hammock, rather than going out with friends. I am still the woman who waits in the school pickup line with my heart pounding, hoping no one will look me in the eye, because then I might have to talk, and I hate small talk.

I often wonder how I, a big emotion, highly sensitive introvert, would have fared in today’s classroom of pods and constant group activities and no real space of my own. It’s no wonder my boy, walking around with a fever of frustration, wondering where he really belongs, over-stimulated on an hourly basis, is crying so loudly for help.

And when a child cries for help, we must listen first and “fix” later.

Sometimes there are ways to bully a boy that have nothing to do with fists and words and threats that scare him into cooperation. Sometimes there are lonely lunch tables and sitting out the fifteen minutes of recess he needs and isolating him in an office for three days. Sometimes bullying can look like kids tattling five times a day on the one boy they’ve learned will always get in trouble, the one teachers will always believe did something wrong. Sometimes bullying can look like writing up a boy sixteen times in twenty days without asking the question, “Why is this happening?”

No kid is born a bad kid.

And if all we’re doing is writing up a kid for a behavior violation, and we’re not doing the work to find out why that behavior violation might have happened, we all lose.

///

Last night my boy sat in his bed while his daddy and I tucked him in. It was there we told him he’d be changing classrooms. His first words were, What if I’m sent to the office again?

And then he cried and begged not to go to school anymore. He is seven years old, for God’s sake.

He is seven years old, and in his mind, everything he does anymore means he’ll get told on by another student. Every action he chooses is the wrong one. Everything about him is unacceptable. His eyes tell me this. I can hardly bear it.

How does a parent speak truth into a heart that believes he’s a problem, an inconvenience, a “bad kid” who will never learn to control his impulses because this is what all those discipline write-ups in a twenty-day history tell him, and this is what a teacher not wanting him anymore tells him, and this is what an in-school suspension sentence tells him.

How do you convince a child that he is loved, that he is good, that he is more than his seven-year-old mistakes, when those conduct violation sheets tell him a different story?

The question follows me into sleep.

And there is a dream, like there has often been on nights I needed to know something—when I saw my brother’s overturned vehicle in a dream before his car accident, when I dreamed of waves too high and dangerous and begged him not to go on his deep-sea fishing trip, when I saw my third son lying in a baby swing with his head wrapped in a bandage weeks before that head injury happened in a church nursery.

This one is no less clear.

In it, we were walking down his school hallway, and in the flash of a moment, I had his new baby brother, Asher, in my arms. He was minutes old. I sat down with my oldest boy at the door of his classroom, and he was very gentle and sweet. He leaned down to kiss Asher and said his brother’s name once.

Then he sat back against the brick wall, and his face got red, and his eyes filled with pain and tears, and he said his newest brother’s name again. “Asher,” he said, except this time his voice filled with sadness and despair. I knew what to do in my dream. I put Asher down in the middle of the hallway, and I took my biggest one in my arms instead. I held him for as long as he sobbed, which was a long, long time.

I woke to an answer that felt clear and awful, all at the same time.

My son has lost his significance in his family at home and his “family” at school, and he is asking for help the only way he knows how. The last three years of his life he has only ever known one brother after another encroaching on his world, and now there will be another. Who is he in the six of them? Who is he in the twenty-four others at school? When will someone listen to hear him? When will someone care enough about his emotional state to help?

Behind all those discipline write-ups, beneath all those words scrawled on a behavior violation page, this is the story told. This is the armor that has begun to crack, because a seven-year-old can only self-repair for so long.

So we are peeling the rest of that armor away. We are rolling away the stone from this grave that sits in the corner of a little boy’s heart. We are fighting, in all the ways we can, for a child who is significant and beautiful and precious, no matter the mistakes he has made in the last thirty days.

We are unwrapping the grave clothes. We are whispering truth. We are writing his name on the tablet of his heart: Gift.

Because this is who he is, even if a school system has flagged him as something else entirely. Still we hold him as a gift.

And there is Another who holds him and fights for him, too. There is Another who will speak his true name and burn up that false one stamped on his back by a world that doesn’t understand. There is Another who promised victory.

And so we wait and hope and love in all the spaces we can.

This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.

(Photo by This is Now Photography)