Spring of 2021. I’m walking my son home from school. He’s 7.

At the first corner it began.

Me, to my son: “You remember you lost video games.”

Son: “That doesn’t make sense!”

We started walking up the hill.

Me: “Nothing could make more sense. You can take off your mask.”

Son, removing his mask: “It should be shows, that makes more sense”

He hopped up onto a retaining wall.

I explained logical consequences. “If you didn’t stop playing video games when I told you to stop playing video games, the logical consequence is to lose video games. The only way it makes sense to lose television is that you’re just not admitting it and trying to get the consequence you prefer. That makes sense.”

We crossed the pedestrian walkway.

I made an analogy to letters. “If you break the letter A, I take away A, not B. A is more similar to A than B.”

Son: “Don’t bring letters into this! Dad. Dad. Listen.”

Me: “You’re just wrong. Anyone would tell you that. Unless they were on your side.”

He made some nonsensical but insistent comparison between B and D. He was on the verge of being truly infuriated, but was managing to continue conversing.

Son: “It’s confusing because you said similar.”

We arrived at the gated house with a moat-like thing and boxwoods.

I made another analogy: “If your sister was riding a bike in the road, we would take away the bike.”

He admitted that made sense.

Son “What about hitting? We can’t take away her hands!”

He started laughing about the absurdity of that “logical” consequence. “They’re attached to her arms!” he proclaimed between laughs.

We were almost to Kingston Pike, the main road we had to cross, most of the way home.

I explained that strategies and theories should line up. If you have a theory about why something is happening, the strategy you use to deal with it should relate.

“So if your sister was hitting you because she was angry, we might use a calming strategy to keep her from hitting you.”

Son: “But usually when she hits me she’s smiling”

Me: “So the strategy aligned to the theory that she’s angry probably wouldn’t work. She’s not angry and hitting you, she just likes to hit you. Calming her down won’t prevent that.”

He provides an example of strategy and theory as we cross Kingston Pike.

Son: “If we wanted leaves to stay on trees in the fall, and our theory was they drop because they lost water, our strategy would be to give them more water.”

Me: “Sure.”

We reach Stillwood, .2 miles from home.

I reiterate the importance of a good theory.

Me: “If we think your sister’s angry and make a strategy because of a bad theory, it won’t solve the problem. Sometimes she is angry, sometimes tired. And those are wrapped up. But she hits you at other times, too. How do you act when you’re tired?”

Son: “I get angry easily.”

Me: “Me, too.”

I’m not a child psychologist. I studied educational psychology and read parenting books and columns and garbage on the Internet. Aaaand my dad was a psychology professor. Everyone talks about logical consequences. They’re better than illogical consequences. Punish a kid with something related to the offense. But my son always says punishments don’t work. And he’s generally right. He tells me, “This punishment will not keep me from doing [the thing] again, it just makes me more angry.”

So what if the strategy of doling out a consequence (logical or contrived) is based on a bad theory? The prison industry teaches a lesson here. Recidivism is generally super high. The punishment does not prevent repeat offenses. The research on spanking kids is clear. Even minimal spanking is so bad, and the information so widespread, that some parents out there are horrified to know I spanked my kids.

Power exerted with violence can and does cause changes. Usually it causes more violence. In the moment or later. In the old days, kids were seen and not heard. And the ones that were compelled to speak, or move their bodies, or anything outside the norm were beaten. Badly. Often. Abuse of power comes as no surprise, said Jenny Holzer. I’m grossed out when someone talks about the good old days when children behaved.

But if contrived consequences don’t work, and natural consequences don’t really work either, what does?

Some time ago, psychologists came up with some ideas that might provide a decent answer. They were examining shame as one of the major categories of reaction people can experience. And they noticed two cultural responses to someone who broke rules or laws: exclusion and integration. When the offender was excluded (by the people who previously had ostensibly included the offender), the offender often avoided shame by blaming or attacking others. Other times the offender was consumed in shame and self-isolated. Either way, the offender in these cultures remained a problem. In the situations where the offender was integrated there was a pattern: the community focused on the offending deed as the thing to be denounced, not the offender. The offender was tasked with repairing the harm and reintegrating with the community.

And that’s restorative justice. I first learned about it in 2002 in Colorado Springs. I caught wind of an organization called the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. As a young adult I learned about convicted murderers coming face to face with the families of the victim. The nuns involved in the CCJRC talked about it as a true form of penance. The stories were kind of amazing. Later I learned restorative justice had been brought into schools as restorative practices. I’ve been lucky enough to have a few of my doctoral students focus on restorative practices in their dissertations. I’ve learned a lot from their research.

I asked my son, “Do you want no punishments?” “Of course!” he said. “Then we have to do something to replace them.” But have I implemented these practices and findings at home? Only sporadically. Culture is hard to change. Maybe next year. Maybe tomorrow! As Howard Zinn said,

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”