Pushing the Reset Button

On Friday, while I had cafeteria duty, I noticed a girl with a bruise on her face.  I asked her what had happened.  She said with a sheepish half-smile, “I got into a fight.  But don’t worry.  It wasn’t on school grounds and no one videotaped it.”

To most adults, and certainly to those of us who are teachers, kids fighting is a bad thing.  But there is a time and place for lecturing a student, and there is a time and place for listening.  I decided that this was the latter, so I prodded her a little.  The girl told me that things had been tense between her and the other girl since early in the school year, and they finally came to a head.  “But we’re cool now,” she added.  “It cleared the air between you?” I asked.  “Yes.”

Another student I spoke with a few months ago was quite concerned about one of the grades on her report card, particularly about what her father’s response would be.  I asked, “What do you think will happen?”  She replied, “He’ll yell at me.  He’ll tell me that I’m a huge disappointment to my family.  I wish he would just hit me.”  I responded with “I understand—words hurt for a lot longer.  However, for good or for ill, it’s not considered OK for parents to hit high school students.”  And then I went on to explain how yelling at her was probably something her father felt that he needed to do, and that her job was to make it clear that she was listening and was appropriately contrite.  But the important thing was that she could respond appropriately without internalizing the harangue.

I recall a chapter from Herman Wouk’s novel, The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder, which I had to read a chapter of in middle school.  In the excerpt, the main character, Herbie, steals money from his father to build a ride at his summer camp.  The ride becomes the hit of the camp, but the owners of the camp talk Herbie into donating all of his revenue to charity, leaving him unable to pay back the money he stole.  When he owns up to his father, he gets a beating, but in Herbie’s words, the beating made the whole thing OK.

There is a common thread in each of these stories.  The teenagers had unresolved emotional conflict.  In two of the stories, there was a physical confrontation, and the confrontation brought about an abrupt end to the conflict.  In the case of the girl with the report card, she genuinely wanted the abrupt end to the conflict, but there was no way for her to get it.

Children live in a world where they have very little control.  Most decisions are made for them, with little or no opportunity for their input.  When they want something, they pour every ounce of energy into trying to convince the other people involved.  Eventually, they either get what they want or they don’t.  If they don’t get what they want, they escalate the situation, often continuing until they receive some sort of punishment.  At some point the moment arrives, the decision is made, the metaphorical reset button is pushed, and life goes on.  Small wonder these children pick fights with each other.  If they feel that a situation is untenable, the only means they know of bringing about a change is to escalate the situation until a confrontation becomes the only option.

This happened to me in my first year of teaching—a girl came in after school to discuss her grade on a test.  She argued her point, threw a tantrum, yelled, cried, and finally, when she didn’t get what she wanted, stomped out of the room.  The next day, she greeted me with a smile and a cheerful “Hi, Mr. Bigler!” as if the whole thing had never happened.  She had put all of her energies into getting the resolution she wanted.  Although the situation didn’t work out the way she wanted, the confrontation pushed her reset button.  I see similar situations every day.  Often I’ll watch as a student escalates an argument with a teacher or administrator, earning a detention or suspension in the process of pushing the reset button.  All the while, I can’t help but wonder whether we can teach these kids how to de-escalate a situation—how to push the reset button without having to go through a conflict to get there.

When my older daughter was about five years old, I explicitly taught her how to negotiate.  I taught her how to ask for something from an adult who might be reluctant to say “yes,” and how to inquire politely and start a discussion if she didn’t get what she wanted.  Many parents told me this was a bad idea—that it would result in her trying to negotiate everything rather than just accepting it as parent-dictated inevitability.  In retrospect, I don’t think she pressed any harder than her peers, but it did make it a lot easier to have a rational discussion with her when the response needed to be different from what she wanted.  It’s a choice I’ve never regretted.

I think this is something all children need.  They need to be taught how to negotiate, and how to de-escalate.  When situations come up in schools or at home, rather than being quick to hand out consequences, it would make more sense for the adult to pause the conversation long enough to have a meta-conversation about how the negotiation could proceed in a way that de-escalates (or at least refrains from escalating) the situation.  I.e., the adult needs to be the one to stop and press the reset button before the conflict occurs.  The first lesson for the child is that it is possible to push the reset button without a conflict.  (Too often, adults expect the child to be the one to press the reset button, even when the child doesn’t realize that this is even possible.)  Then, the adult needs to give the child a chance to practice de-escalating from that point.  If the child de-escalates successfully, the second lesson has been learned and the reward is that the child successfully avoids the negative consequence that might otherwise have come to pass.

This is not an easy task, especially at first.  Like so many other lessons, it requires the adult to be patient, keep the child on task (or get the child back on task), and offer up helpful comment after helpful comment while the child tries and fails to make the right thing happen.  However, like so many other lessons, with practice the child will eventually learn the process and become adept at it.  And as I think about this generation who will be running the country when I’m in a retirement home, I really want them to have finely tuned de-escalation skills and a multitude of graceful and socially acceptable ways of pushing the reset button.

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