What Happens When We Stop Bossing Kids Around

Our daughter and I had arrived at preschool at the same time as a mother with her two kids. As we adults greeted one another, her children took off, racing wildly toward the front door. 

She shouted after them, "Get your butts over here!" a command they certainly heard, but chose to ignore. She chuckled embarrassedly, then turned to our daughter who was staring at her with an expression of shock. "Your daddy's lucky you're such a good girl." She then lit out after her kids.

A couple years later, as I contemplated my first day as the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool's 3-5's teacher, I worried about a lot of things. Among them was the recognition that I had a visceral distaste for bossing kids around. But it wasn't only that. This mother wasn't the only bossy parent I'd been around, and if anything, their kids seemed to be less cooperative and more provoking than mine. Throughout my years as a parent of a preschooler I was regularly told that I was just "lucky" to have such a "naturally" well-behaved child, one who "listened." But I'd concluded that they had their cause-and-effect flip-flopped. Their bossiness wasn't a response to their kid's misbehavior, but rather the cause of it. The children were just pushing back against being told what to do, which seemed to me like a perfectly natural response.

I knew that if I took the so-called "tough love" approach with a roomful of preschoolers, I would have be prepared to threaten children with punishment and tease them with rewards. It didn't sit right with me. I'd been "lucky" so far, so I decided I would press my luck

I tried an experiment. I was going to let the children make all their own rules. 

Because it was a cooperative, their parents would be working alongside me as assistant teachers. During our fall parent orientation meeting, I told them that we would begin the year in a state of anarchy, and that their job was simply to keep the children from killing each other -- in other worlds, keep them safe, but otherwise stay out of their way. 

Of course, it didn't stay anarchy for long. On the first day, within minutes of opening the doors, a child complained, "Teacher Tom, she took that book from me!"

That was my cue. I responded, "I can tell you don't like that." I then turned to the group, "Does anyone like it when someone takes something from them?" Of course, none of them liked it, so I suggested, "Then how about we all agree to not take things from each other?" They all agreed, so I made a show of tearing a sheet of butcher paper from the classroom roll, taped it to the wall and wrote, No taking things.

Other hands shot up. "No hitting!" "No biting!" "No yelling in people's ears!"

It was clear the children knew exactly how they wanted to be treated. We soon had a core list of agreements arrived at by consensus. I was at Woodland Park for nearly two decades and this is more or less how it went every year.

I treasure this process of making agreements by consensus because it removes me from the role of commander. I don't have to spend my days saying, "No hitting," or "No throwing things." Instead, when someone forgets their agreement, my job is to remind them: "I want to remind you that we all agreed: no hitting." 

The natural consequence of forgetting an agreement is that you are reminded of it. If they forgot it again, I reminded them again. And again. Just in the same way I might keep reminding a child reciting the alphabet that they had left out the letter D. Of course, if violence was involved, I stopped that because my job, even in our state of anarchy, is safety. I would say, matter-of-factly, "My job is to keep everyone safe. When you hit people it isn't safe, so I can't let you hit people." But even as I physically restrained a child, I added, "I'm going to remind you, that you agreed, no hitting."

But most of the time, all it took was the reminder.

Yes, it's all less efficient than yelling, "Get your butts over here!" but far more satisfying for everyone involved. By stepping out of the role of strongman rule enforcer, I left the children with nothing to push back against . . . And in that space they found that they were free to think for themselves, to make their own decision about how to behave. This is called self-discipline, which is everyone's goal.

I often think about my childhood cartoons when the protagonist was faced with a choice. A little angel would appear on one shoulder and a little devil on the other. When a child is being bossed around, they almost always listen to the devil, but when allowed to think for themselves, the voice they hear is the angel's. Most children, most of the time, make pro-social choices, but they are equally inclined to resist being told what to do. That's the way nature has made us. When left to make their own decisions, their own agreements, I've found that I never have to resort to threats and punishments. I've found that rewards are irrelevant because creating community is its own reward.

If at some point a child wants to change their agreements, they don't pushback against the adults. They understand that they have to talk to their friends about it. One year, a boy began to regret that he'd agreed to "no name calling." Specifically, he wanted to call the other children "poopy head." When he brought it up to the group, however, no one agreed with him. He tried again the following day and the day after that. Then he had the idea to campaign amongst his friends, so that when we gathered that day, there was a genuine poopy head contingent, but since agreements require consensus, it remained a no-go. The remarkable thing about this was that throughout this entire process, he continued to honor his agreement.

This is not due to luck. It's due to human nature.

When I tell adults about this experience, they like to present me with extreme, theoretical cases. "But what if the kids all agree that hitting is okay?" or "What if a kid just won't keep their agreement?" This is the kind catastrophic thinking that has never actually manifested in my classroom. The most extreme thing I've ever done is to say to a child, "You're having a hard time remembering your agreement. I'm going to ask you to play somewhere else until you're ready to come back." I've never met a child who didn't know when they were ready to come back.

It was this experiment that set me on my journey to understanding that the children, these fully-formed human beings, didn't need me to manage them. If I provided the proper framework, they were perfectly capable of managing their own classroom.

My goal has never been "discipline" in the old-fashioned sense of the word. It's an approach to "classroom management" that eliminates the need for behaviorist tactics. It's about respecting children enough to let them think about their own behavior and its impact on others, rather than fearing the potential punisher. 

That first year, there were several skeptical parents, but they all came to see that the stereotypes didn't hold. Indeed, many of them replaced their household rules with family agreements. The children didn't show up as selfish or defiant, but rather, when given the chance to think for themselves, most of them, most of the time, chose cooperation, fairness, and kindness. It's the same discovery I saw every year: the more ownership the children had in their community, the more responsible -- the more self-disciplined -- they became. 

This was my starting point as a play-based educator and is a cornerstone of my course Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management (see below). It's not luck. It's about learning to trust young children enough to allow them to think for themselves. That's not just good discipline, but democracy in action.

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