There is no more singular dread for a child than the feeling of being in trouble. The all-encompassing sensation that you have irrevocably messed up causes such a ripple effect from your mistake that things feel as though they will never recover. The worst part of this is undoubtedly the adult reactions to your mistake.

The thing about being a child and making mistakes is that the speed of play and the excitement of peers creates just the right energy for all rational thought to cease. These seemingly mindless moments create the joy of play, without a doubt. Wild abandon lets us shed inhibitions, along with the proprioceptive safety measures that are usually employed when we interact with the spaces around us. A certain amount of joy and freedom can ensue when we stop correcting ourselves and let loose.

Currently I fill two roles, one as an educator who seeks to manage a classroom successfully with agreements and guidelines that allow everyone to be safe and happy. The other as a former child who was often in trouble. I can picture with such profound clarity the expression of disappointment on my teachers’ or parent’s faces after I had done something “bad.” The action invariably followed by one of these adults asking exasperatedly, “What were you thinking?!” That’s a question that always befuddled me, as I always thought it obvious that had I been thinking, I surely would not have ended up in that spot.

Allow me to set the scene of my job as the closing shift teacher in a toddler classroom arriving into a less-than-desirable setting. Opening the door to the classroom, there is a sense of the air being sucked from the room, a heavy feeling of something having just taken place. The children all seem to be looking at me sideways, not the usual joyful eye contact that I am accustomed to. My co-teacher approaches with a solemn expression. Pulling me aside, she explains what has happened just prior to my arrival. Several children made a game of swinging from the shelves on the wall, one of which caused the shelf to break and come crashing to the ground. 

Momentarily, I feel a sense of fury and frustration at the prospect of the room being damaged by the children. A feeling of despair washes over me as I think of how I will appear to parents when they arrive later to pick up their child. Will they feel that I am not properly supervising their children? Will my image as a capable educator, delegator and supervisor be diminished? Will I appear out of control? Taking a moment to shake off these feelings, I settle on the task at hand: what can we do about this?

I gathered the children on the rug to talk and brought some paper to take notes, should we need them. I started by saying, “What happened in our classroom this morning? I noticed something is different.”

I tried my best to keep my tone inquisitive and non-accusatory. The children took a moment to respond, looking at one another.

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One child finally blurted out, “We broke the shelf.”

My face took on an expression of surprise, and I said, “Wow. I am sorry to hear that, we use the shelf a lot. How did that happen?”

Another child in the circle loudly exclaimed, “I swung on it and I
breaked it.”

Internally my heart swelled at this child’s brave accountability.

“Wow, that must have been so scary! Was that scary?”

The child looked at me with relief and said, “Yeah!”

I looked at the child and asked, “Were you hurt?”

The child responded, “No, I was okay. Just scary.”

I made a gesture lifting my hands in the air and said, “Phew! I am so glad nobody got hurt!” 

The tone of the gathering had shifted drastically by this point. The children were no longer on their guard, but instead were interacting and talking openly about this undesirable occurrence. I asked the children how we should resolve the situation.

“What should we do next? Should we put the shelf back up or leave it down?”

The children looked from one to another, shrugging their shoulders.

“You know, this is your room, do you think we need a shelf there? Maybe if we broke it, it should not be there?”

The children continued shrugging and wide-eyed smiling at me. “Maybe…we do not fix the shelf. Maybe if we fix it, we will swing on it again and break it again.”

One child chimed in, “Good point!”

I said, “It could break again. Also, the teachers can move the things that were on that shelf to another place in the room.”

Our meeting seemed to be coming to a close. “Does everyone agree, then? Will we not fix the shelf?”

The group emphatically declared, “Yes!” 

It is important to note here that it was not easy to control my reaction as much as I did in this meeting with the children. Had I witnessed the shelf being broken, as opposed to arriving in the aftermath, I might have had an even tougher time with this. Two things helped me: considering the perspective of the children and thinking about my own feelings as a child. Being in trouble when I was a child was and is tied strongly with feelings of shame. So often, I recall being in situations like this, having done something surprising or shocking and worrying about adults’ reactions. 

Everyone knows what being in trouble feels like, but what does it mean? Do we want children to feel shame, or do we want them to develop a sense of action as they work to resolve and repair things that did not go according to plan? If we boil it down, there are only actions and consequences, and as we all know, the worst consequences often manifest in how others feel about our actions.

As a teacher, I wanted to remove anger from this interaction. I was hopeful that it would remove the shame the children may have been feeling. I watched closely for ways that my tone and approach would change our method of resolution.

In my memories of feeling in trouble, the overwhelming sensation was of my own self-criticism. I felt angry at myself, and needed no explanation as to why the mistake I made was wrong. I banked on the fact that these children knew that tearing a shelf off the wall was a bad choice, and I was right.

The instant we began discussing the event, they knew with clarity that they had made a mistake. It occurred to me that a great deal of feeling “in trouble” stemmed from the redundancy of re-experiencing the mistake through the lecture that followed the event. Leaping past the humiliation aspects of rehashing the event, and instead jumping to the resolution, put us all on the same page: namely knowing there was a problem and figuring a way to solve it together.

Discussing my goal of wanting to protect and sustain the classroom fixtures alongside their goal of seeking physical challenges in play allowed us to commiserate and start to plan. The result was a powerful experience of empathy for both myself and the children, as well as an important reminder that the people in a room are exponentially more important than the stuff.