FROM THE AUTHOR'S DESK

Every chapter of The Hundred Percent Child includes a From the Author's Desk section — a

real professional story from my own twenty years of practice. These are not illustrations. They

are the reason I wrote this book. I am sharing two of them here.

From Chapter 2 — Fred Rogers as an Educational Theorist

Early in my career I had a child in my twos classroom who would have random outbursts and

bite his peers. I described him to colleagues as disruptive and angry. That language shaped

everything — the relationship with his family became strained, coworkers labeled him a bad

child, and his behavior worsened. I was describing what I saw on the outside without asking a

single question about what was happening on the inside.

Then one day, instead of correcting him, I looked at him and said: "I know you are upset. What

can I do to make it better?" His whole body shifted to a relaxed mode. He pointed to the door. We went

for a walk.

That walk taught me more about Fred Rogers' principle — that anything mentionable is

manageable — than any training ever had. I had spent weeks trying to fix behavior that was

simply a feeling that had nowhere to go. The moment I gave it a door, he walked through it.

What I know now that I wish I had known then: we do not tend to ask children how they feel

because we were not taught to mention our own feelings as adults. It makes people

uncomfortable. So we skip it — with our colleagues, with families, and most harmfully, with

children. But the feelings do not disappear when we skip them. They come out in biting. They

come out in outbursts. The day my own daughter told me she did not like the way a teacher

spoke to her, I understood the full weight of Rogers' conviction. The way we speak to children

is the way we teach them to speak. We can break their self-esteem or build it — one word at a

time.

“Every child in my care deserved a Hundred Percent educator. I tried

to be that for them. I did not always succeed. But I never stopped

trying — and I never stopped learning from the trying.” Sharon Ouakil