Some thoughts on kids, consequences, parents, schools…and the questionable decision-making abilities of developing humans
Your kid messed up; Welcome to the club.
Nobody enjoys getting that phone call from school. You know the one. “Hi, this is the school. Do you have a minute to talk about something that happened today?” There is almost no chance anything good follows that sentence. Nobody calls to say, “Your child demonstrated such remarkable character today that we felt compelled to interrupt your workday.” No. Something happened. And apparently your kid was involved.
Immediately, the parental brain kicks into gear. Is everyone okay? What happened? What did my kid do? Wait…are we sure it was my kid? Did anyone actually SEE my kid do it? And, depending on the child, somewhere around question four you may arrive at the more realistic: Oh Lord. What did this little turd do now?
I understand. These conversations are uncomfortable because we’re talking about our kids. We love them. We protect them. We advocate for them. And when someone tells us our child did something wrong, there is a tiny little switch inside the parental brain that can flip from “reasonable adult” to “I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE VILLAGE TO THE GROUND” remarkably quickly. That’s probably biological. I haven’t researched it. It just feels true.
So before we gather the villagers, light the torches, open Facebook, activate the parent group chat and call Grandma as a character witness, there are a few things worth considering.
First, your child is going to mess up.
I realize this may be difficult news. Please sit down if necessary.
Even wonderful kids do dumb things. Sometimes spectacularly dumb things. Things that leave every adult involved staring silently for several seconds while the brain attempts to process the sequence of decisions that led us here.
Your child may be intelligent enough to bypass every parental control on an iPad, troubleshoot the Wi-Fi and explain to you why your phone “is being weird,” yet somehow lack the predictive ability to determine what might happen after launching a yogurt tube across a crowded cafeteria.
This is because children are still learning how to be people. Their brains are developing. Their judgment is developing. Their impulse control is developing. Occasionally, all three appear to take the same day off.
A kind child can say something unkind. A responsible child can make an irresponsible decision. A respectful child can have a disrespectful moment. A very intelligent child can stare directly at an obviously terrible idea, carefully consider the available options and conclude, Yep. Let’s do that.
That doesn’t necessarily tell us who the child is. It tells us they’re still growing. And if we’re being fair, most adults are still working on this too. The primary difference is that we’ve had more practice hiding our bad decisions and, for the most part, we’ve stopped throwing yogurt.
It’s also important to understand that when a school corrects your child, we are not issuing you a parenting grade. There isn’t a secret meeting afterward where the principal closes the blinds, opens a giant leather-bound book and announces, “Well, that’s twelve points off the Velez family parenting score.” Kids are individuals. They have personalities, ideas, friendships, impulses, opinions and—rather inconveniently—free will.
Sometimes children will even do something their parents specifically told them not to do. Sometimes something you discussed that very morning.
“What is the ONE thing I told you not to do today?”
“Throw yogurt?”
“And what did you do?”
“Technically, I didn’t throw it…”
And there it is. The defense has entered the courtroom.
Great parenting doesn’t produce children who never make mistakes. If somebody has figured out how to do that, please write the book because the rest of humanity would like a copy. Great parenting helps children learn what to do after they make the mistakes they’re inevitably going to make.
Which brings us to one of the most powerful words in school discipline: but.
“He shouldn’t have done that, but…” “She knows better, but…” “Yes, he called him that, but the other kid…” “Yes, he threw the Chromebook, but Connor had been bothering him all morning.”
Poor Connor.
Connor may indeed be annoying. Connor may have been annoying since approximately 8:07 a.m. There may be an entire Connor situation that needs investigating, and we will absolutely get to Connor.
But first: Why are we throwing Chromebooks?
Everything after the but may be completely legitimate. Context matters. Another student may have contributed to what happened. An adult may have handled something poorly. There may be information the school doesn’t have. There may be information the parent doesn’t have. We should talk about all of it. But we also need to deal with what came before the but. Your child made a choice. Let’s help them own that choice. Then we can circle back to Connor.
Parents also know their children in ways schools never will. You know their heart. You know the shy kid underneath the attitude. You know what happened at home last night. You know the child who just did something utterly ridiculous is also the kid who helps Grandma carry in her groceries. You know they cried when the dog died and that the stuffed animal they’ve had since they were three is absolutely, positively “just decoration” now.
Teachers don’t get the Parent Edition of your child.
But teachers do see something parents don’t always get to see: your child operating independently inside a community containing hundreds of other developing humans whose brains are also occasionally closed for maintenance.
That’s valuable information too.
School is basically an enormous social experiment with backpacks. Middle school, in particular, probably deserves its own scientific classification.
Neither the parent’s perspective nor the school’s perspective tells the entire story. You know one version of your child. We see another. Both are real. Put them together and we have a much better chance of understanding what’s actually happening.
And since we’re acknowledging uncomfortable truths, educators mess up too. There. I said it. Please don’t alert the authorities.
Teachers and administrators are human. They make hundreds of decisions every day. Who needs help? Who needs space? Who started it? Who retaliated? Who genuinely needs to use the restroom? Who has suddenly developed a mysterious medical condition requiring seventeen bathroom visits during algebra but apparently none during lunch?
Most of the time, educators get those decisions right. Sometimes we don’t.
If you believe something was handled unfairly, ask questions. Advocate for your child. Bring concerns forward. Please do. There is simply a tremendous difference between beginning with, “Can you help me understand what happened?” and beginning with, “MY CHILD WOULD NEVER DO THAT!”
Because occasionally, sitting somewhere nearby, your child is thinking:
Oh, I absolutely did that.
One approach starts a conversation. The other causes everyone in the office to glance toward the coffee pot.
Then there are consequences. Nobody enjoys watching their child experience them. Our parental instinct is to protect our kids, and that’s a good instinct. But protection and rescue aren’t always the same thing.
A missed recess, lunch detention, temporary loss of a privilege, apology or uncomfortable conversation is unlikely to destroy your child’s future. Harvard is probably not going to call in eleven years and say, “We were prepared to offer Madison admission, but we’ve recently learned about the lunch detention of October 2026. Our hands are tied.”
Reasonable consequences allow children to learn that choices produce outcomes while the stakes are still relatively small. Ideally, the pattern becomes: bad decision, manageable consequence, reflection, better decision next time.
The alternative pattern—bad decision, Dad calls everyone, consequence disappears, child concludes I AM INVINCIBLE—doesn’t tend to age particularly well.
We also have to be careful about what happens when somebody else’s child is the one who messed up. Schools are small communities, and information travels very quickly. Accurate information travels somewhat less quickly. A story gets told, retold, embellished, passed through the group chat and discussed in the pickup line. By Thursday afternoon, a sixth grader who shoved someone near the drinking fountain has somehow become the leader of an organized crime syndicate operating out of Portable 6.
There’s a big difference between saying, “He shoved another student,” and saying, “He’s a bully.” One describes a behavior. The other defines a child.
Your child deserves some grace when they screw up.
So does someone else’s.
Yes. Even Connor.
Another source of frustration is that parents may not get to know everything that happens afterward. If another student is involved, schools often cannot tell you exactly what consequence that student received. That does not mean nothing happened.
“So what happened to the other kid?”
“We addressed the situation appropriately.”
“Okay…but how?”
“We can’t discuss another student’s discipline.”
“So nothing happened?”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“But what happened?”
“We addressed it appropriately.”
And now we’ve entered one of education’s least satisfying conversational loops.
We know that’s frustrating. You’d probably prefer the complete investigative dossier, witness statements, surveillance footage, disciplinary history, photographs and perhaps a PowerPoint with arrows.
We cannot provide the PowerPoint.
Student privacy matters, including the privacy of your child when your child is the one standing on the wrong side of a questionable decision.
School discipline has also changed. Many of us remember a different era. Some of us attended schools where a teacher could silence thirty children simply by slowly removing her glasses and staring across the room.
No yelling. No referral. No behavior chart.
Just…glasses off.
Thirty children immediately reconsidered every decision they’d made since birth.
Modern discipline tends to focus less on punishment simply for punishment’s sake and more on changing behavior, repairing harm, teaching better choices and preventing the behavior from happening again. That can take time because children are not vending machines. We cannot insert one detention, press B7 and have a fully rehabilitated eighth grader drop into the tray.
It would make scheduling much easier.
If something doesn’t seem right, talk to us. Call. Email. Ask for a meeting. Ask questions. Tell us what you’re concerned about. You may have information we don’t have. We may have information you don’t have. We may even discover—brace yourself—that both sides misunderstood something.
It happens.
What usually doesn’t help is the 10:47 p.m. Facebook post that begins, “I normally don’t post things like this, BUT…”
Oh no.
There’s that but again.
The parent group-text investigation isn’t particularly useful either, nor is the parking-lot tribunal or the always-reliable statement, “Well, everybody says…”
I have worked in education for a while, and I have yet to actually meet Everybody.
Everybody apparently knows everything that happens on campus, witnesses every incident, knows precisely what administrators did afterward and has an astonishing amount of free time.
Please have Everybody call the office.
I have several questions.
None of this means serious behavior should be minimized. Bullying, harassment, threats, violence and legitimate safety concerns require appropriate intervention. Parents should speak up. Schools should listen. Schools should act when action is warranted.
But investigations take time. We have to gather information, talk to students, talk to adults, compare stories and occasionally figure out how five eyewitnesses managed to provide seven entirely different accounts of the same 45-second event.
Fast isn’t always fair. Fair isn’t always fast. We’re trying to get to both.
Ultimately, the goal isn’t perfect kids.
Thank goodness, because we’re fresh out.
The goal is young people who gradually learn to take responsibility, make better choices, repair relationships, handle disappointment, accept reasonable consequences, show empathy and eventually navigate life without an assistant principal materializing from behind a shrub and saying, “Let’s think about that choice.”
Reading matters. Math matters. Science matters. Standards matter. But learning how to screw something up, own it, make it right when possible, learn something and move forward matters too. Maybe more than we sometimes realize.
So if you get that phone call someday, remember that we’re usually not calling because we’ve given up on your child.
Quite the opposite.
We’re calling because we believe your child can do better. We believe this particular bad decision doesn’t have to become the next bad decision. We believe there’s something to be learned here.
And we’re going to need you on the team.
Parents and schools won’t agree about every decision. We shouldn’t expect to. But we ought to be able to agree on the destination: helping our kids become capable, responsible, resilient, decent human beings who slowly—but steadily—make fewer decisions involving airborne dairy products.
We’re on the same team.
Even when your kid is the reason we’re having the meeting.
And yes.
We’ll still investigate Connor.
There’s more waiting at https://xinkblotz.com.
Telling stories, sharing thoughts, and drinking coffee. A blend of fiction, reflection, and whatever’s brewing—one post at a time.
Stories have always traveled best by word of mouth. If one of these finds a place in your heart, I’d be honored if you’d drop a like or share it with someone else.
© 2026 Mariano Velez ~ InkBlotz Press
Leave a Reply