Parent Tips: Restorative Practices
by Julie Stevens
T
rust is transformative—between teachers and students, parents and children, in homes,
schools, and workplaces. Trust creates space for empathy, the bedrock on which moral
action stands. Trust creates space to relax, focus, and learn. It is no accident that Marilyn
Watson, consultant to CSEE and former program director for the Child Development Project—
an extraordinarily successful effort to foster ethical, social, and intellectual development—titled
her book co-authored with teacher Laura Ecken Learning to Trust: Transforming Difficult Elementary
Classrooms through Developmental Discipline. Restorative practices and developmental discipline
offer ways to communicate compassionately, to more deeply understand ourselves and others,
and to heal emotional wounds both small and great. While building trust, let alone transformative
trust, is both challenging and necessary, the strategies that follow can help.
• Experiment with some form of family meeting—to check in, to reflect on what’s go-
ing well (or not), and to work together devising basic rules for day-to-day household
operations. Sitting together for a meal can provide a natural, relaxed setting. Children are
capable of participating as soon as they can speak in sentences; siblings (and parents!)
can practice respectful listening/taking turns, so all voices are heard.
• Consider your views on children and parenting, and how your perspective affects
your approach. Do you view kids as predisposed to be caring or self-interested and ma-
nipulative? Is the aim of effective parenting to create a caring society or to advance
one child’s prospects? Does genuine parental power and moral authority derive from
fostering trust and modeling self-control or offering rewards, threatening punishments,
“rescuing” a child from not-too-consequential consequences?
• Educators working with restorative practices borrowed from court settings note that
tracking precedents and patterns relating to misconduct is key to success. Pay atten-
tion to what triggers or precedes disruptive behavior—from something as simple
as being tired or hungry to long-standing sources of family conflict. Factor in how the
social-emotional development of each family member contributes to patterns of ten-
sion. Pinpoint what makes it challenging for you, your partner, or your kids to be their
best self.
• To encourage a positive outcome when your child makes a mistake, bolster their
positive self-image to help them avoid either framing their action as “bad” or
those affected as somehow deserving to be harmed. Respond to misdeeds—push-
ing a friend, being caught cheating on a test, speaking disrespectfully—by attributing
their behavior to the best possible motive consistent with the facts: “I don’t think you
meant to really hurt your buddy,” “I wonder if you were too focused on a good grade
because you thought I’d be upset.” “Maybe you spoke before you thought.”
Page 42 Winter 2019
CSEE Connections