What a red-hot spoon taught one mother about labeling her son

It was a Saturday morning, and Adele Faber was making breakfast, feeling pleased with how well her two sons were finally getting along. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw her older boy, David, holding a spoon over the hot electric coil she'd just used to boil water. He called his younger brother, Andy, over to see how hot it was getting, then grabbed him and pressed the burning spoon into the bare skin of his neck.

Andy screamed. Faber screamed. David ran. After tending to the burn, she sat alone in the bedroom, more depressed, she later said, than she had ever been. What David had done felt so calculated, so vicious, that she decided, in that moment, he had an evil streak, that he was, in her words, a bad seed, no part of her.

Then David knocked on the door. He stood there, small and scared. And something shifted in her. Instead of confirming his worst fear about himself, she told him about his Uncle Stu, who used to rip her toenails off as a kid and grew up to be, by all accounts, a perfectly decent adult. Kids do crazy, cruel things sometimes, she told him. It doesn't mean they're monsters.

That conversation, Faber later realized, was only half the fix. The other half was refusing to let the label stick, in her own head, going forward. She stopped thinking of David as the bully and Andy as the victim, and started actively looking for, and naming, the opposite qualities in each of them, David's capacity for kindness, Andy's capacity for standing up for himself. A week later, when David started teasing his brother again, instead of despairing, she took him by the shoulders and said, fiercely, 'David, you have a superior capacity to be nice. Use it.' He grinned. The teasing stopped.

The pattern behind this, which Faber and Mazlish later mapped out with other parents, is that children get locked into roles from three directions at once, parents label them, siblings label them, and children label themselves, and once the label sticks, everyone, including the child, starts acting to confirm it. The way out isn't ignoring bad behavior. It's refusing to let one incident define who a child is capable of becoming, and saying so, out loud, at the exact moment it would be easiest to believe the worst.

The next time your child does something that makes you want to file them permanently under 'the mean one' or 'the difficult one,' stop and separate the act from the identity, even if it takes real effort in the moment. Say directly, to the child, what you believe they're capable of instead, something like 'you have it in you to be kind, use it,' rather than confirming the role with a label. If you notice siblings pinning each other into fixed parts, the bossy one, the baby, the wimp, gently offer the group a different picture of that child. And when a child is being hurt by a sibling, go to the injured child first, before you deal with the one who caused it, so no one becomes permanently cast as either the victim or the villain.