—
On the playground, all around me dozens of children were playing soccer, swinging on the swing set, screaming from the jungle gym, and generally chasing one another maniacally. It was all normal, sure. But something felt a little off. It took me a moment to recognize it: Where were the loners? Most playgrounds have an odd kid or two who hang out in the corner, drawing quietly, reading a book, or jumping rope by themselves. But everyone here seemed like they were part of a giant crew. Everyone, that is, except for one single eight-year-old boy who stood by himself, glowering. I watched him intently as something churned inside him, growing darker and darker, until eventually, he crossed the playground to pick up a four-foot-long fallen branch and hurled it at a group of kids playing tag. He missed them, and they gave him a bit of a weird look and went to play a little farther off.
A yard duty monitor approached him. What he had done was an unmistakably violent act, one that could have really hurt someone, so I expected her to put him on a time-out or send him to an office somewhere to be dealt with. But instead, she knelt down and said, “You look upset. What’s going on?”
“My best friend is playing with other people today,” he said, looking down, close to tears. “I’m mad because we play together every day.”
The monitor called over his best friend. “Hey, Nico!” Nico trotted over.
“Jeremy here says that he’s feeling worried because you’re playing with other kids today. Jeremy, are you feeling worried that maybe Nico doesn’t want to be your friend anymore?”
Jeremy, again avoiding eye contact, barely nodded.
“Oh, yeah, of course I still like you,” Nico said, smiling, a reassuring duh in his voice. “I’m just trying something new today.”
“It’s okay to be great friends and still sometimes play with other friends, right? It doesn’t mean you don’t like each other,” the monitor said.
“Yeah, you’re my friend, Jeremy!” Nico affirmed confidently.
Jeremy finally looked up. “I like you, too, Nico.” The yard duty monitor retreated. In the span of a minute, Jeremy was a changed man. He ran toward the kids playing soccer, and for the last moments of lunch, he dribbled the ball gleefully up and down the field, having rejoined the flock.
* * *
—
You want to talk about trauma? Man, it doesn’t get much worse than kids who’ve survived the foster system. Fifty-one percent of children in the foster system have four or more ACEs, compared with 13 percent of children outside the foster system.[1] It’s not abnormal for foster kids to shuffle in and out of a dozen or more foster homes during their childhood, leaving them without a sense of the stability of a true home. One study found that foster children are ten times more likely to be sexually abused.[2] Of course, these painful childhoods have real consequences when the children get older. Ninety percent of foster kids who have had more than five placements will enter the criminal justice system.[3]
These statistics are why Mott Haven has a different focus from other schools. Instead of academic success, Mott Haven’s main priority is on creating a community within their school—a place for kids to feel safe and to have a stable, loving, family-like structure they might not have at home. And a big part of that means having a totally unconventional disciplinary system.
In their classrooms, children aren’t punished for slouching or tapping their pencils or even getting up and walking around in the middle of a lesson. In fact, as long as they’re actively listening or working, kids can stand up or change desks. If they’re truly overwhelmed, there are quiet spaces in which children can hide out—little cozy blanket forts or beanbag chairs where they can excuse themselves and take a minute to self-soothe. There is a period a few times a week specifically built for students to share the things that are really bugging them in school and in life. And most of the kids meet with therapists at least once a week.
When children do act out—as children, especially traumatized children, are wont to do—administrators focus on healing and maintaining relationships rather than punishment.
When the yard duty monitor went up to Jeremy, she knew he wasn’t acting out because he wanted to be bad. She recognized something was going on with him. When she asked him about it, she recognized that he just wanted to be seen, to be reassured he was loved. Sure enough, his anguish dissipated as soon as he felt safe. And in calling over his friend, she also gave Jeremy a way to repair a relational rupture—and she taught Nico how to assuage his young friend’s fears. “Yeah, we never let a fight just go here,” the monitor said. “It’s different from other schools, in that we mediate every disagreement and argument. We don’t want grudges to fester. We want everyone to feel safe.”
“There isn’t this group, that group. We are all a group,” said a girl I’ll call Willow. “At this school, everybody has a problem. And everyone has a niceness inside of them. They can be mean sometimes, but even when they’re bad, they can be…good. Very, very good.”
Willow was a fan of Nina Simone and Cardi B. She loved to crack corny jokes and giggle mischievously afterward, like a tiny dad. You’d never guess it from talking to her, but she told me that before she came to Mott Haven, she’d been suspended from multiple schools for her anger issues—she’d assaulted teachers and thrown chairs across the room. She had low expectations for Mott Haven. She expected it to be like her old school, where popular girls teased her for having bad hair. But she told me that conflicts here didn’t end with her feeling ugly.
She shared a story of a spat she’d had with a friend a couple of weeks prior. Willow had called another girl crazy. Her friend told her that was inappropriate and ignored her for the rest of the period. But the next day, Willow asked her, “Are you still mad at me?” And her friend—using the deftly reassuring language she’d been taught—said, “No, I’m not mad. I’m over it, because I’m your friend.”