| Sticks and Stones and Names Will Hurt You
Troublemaker. Disruptive. Difficult. These labels can follow a child around their whole life with devastating consequences.
At a Philadelphia City Council hearing organized by Children First, teenagers shared their experiences with the juvenile justice system and having to wear ankle monitors. “Everyone can see it and they treat you different, like you’re a troublemaker,” one kid said.
The Philadelphia Probation Office uses GPS ankle monitors as a tool to supervise youth in the community, ostensibly as an alternative to jail. Ideally, children remain at home and in school with accountability that keeps communities safe, but really youth and families find ankle monitors stigmatizing and discourages them from going to their neighborhood school or participating in positive activities. Ankle monitoring also seems to trap kids deeper in the system because every technical violation, like being just a few minutes late for curfew, risks them being locked up.
At the same time young people were talking about ankle monitoring stigmatization, parents and preschool providers were meeting at a symposium on new Children First research, Supporting All Young Learners to Thrive: Dismantling the Preschool to Prison Pipeline.
A child care provider there got to the heart of the problem. “I volunteer as a court-appointed special advocate in the social service system. I see on the opposite end of the spectrum – kids who are 15, 16, 17 years old – the same thing happening at 15 months, 16 months, 17 months.”
The “troublemaker” labeling starts young. One child in ten is expelled from their child care or pre-k because of behavior issues, undermining that child’s sense of themselves and their world. Young kids need familiar, safe, and nurturing places to build critical skills like self-regulation, problem-solving, and positive relationships. They’re at the age of developing trust and healthy attachments, but then suddenly they never see their teachers or their friends again.
When children’s learning differences and behavioral needs aren’t met in the classroom – as early as pre-k – those challenges often follow them into K-12. Over time, these unmet needs become more pronounced and children are treated as problems to be managed or contained. This helps to explain why kids who have been pushed out of preschool have higher instances of repeated discipline in school, lower levels of school readiness, mental health challenges, and more involvement in the criminal justice systems.
A presenter at the symposium described how a child care center embraced her nephew after he was pushed out of another program. She feared he would be labeled a problem from the get-go but found otherwise. “The staff at the new program were really supportive and found ways to help him, like making sure he was taking breaks during the day.”
Her experience shows how imperative it is that every program has the staff and the training to meet kids where they are. Without that help, without that caring and willingness to make her nephew feel seen and valued, he could’ve been one of those teenagers testifying in City Hall about being in the juvenile justice system.
The preschool to prison pipeline is real which is why Children First works diligently to correct the early learning staffing shortages, abysmal pay, and limited training opportunities and reform the juvenile justice system so kids don’t feel hopeless. To paraphrase a common childhood retort, sticks and stones may break bones, but bones can heal in time. An entire childhood being denied the fundamentals for success, now that’s really going to hurt.
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