I keep returning to Boy Carrying a Sword when my work feels heavy in a way that is more than fatigue. This past week, there were two major conflicts among the young adults in my care: one physical, one emotional. Fights, plainly. They were disruptive, frightening, and consequential. But what lingers for me is not the spectacle of conflict; it is the recognition that follows it. I call them young adults because that is the language of the institution, the language of forms and policies. In practice, few of them are even close to being adults at all. They are unfinished. They remind me of Manet’s boy: holding something powerful, dangerous, and irreversible before he understands what it asks of him.
Trauma arrests development. I have come to believe this not as an abstract claim but as an observation repeated often enough to become unavoidable. Trauma does not merely injure; it interrupts the sequence by which emotional regulation, impulse control, and reflective thought are learned. Many of the young people I work with mastered survival early. They learned vigilance, speed, and defense. What they did not have the opportunity to learn, because the conditions did not permit it, were the slower skills of negotiation, self-soothing, and perspective-taking. When conflict arises, the body responds before the mind can intervene. As Bessel van der Kolk reminds us, trauma lives in the body. Behavior becomes a form of speech when language and regulation have not been adequately developed.
What complicates this further is poverty. Over time, I have come to rely on a distinction that feels increasingly precise: not every at-risk student lives in poverty, but nearly every student living in poverty is at risk. Poverty functions as a constant stressor rather than a static condition. It narrows temporal horizons, intensifies threat perception, and erodes trust in systems that promise delayed reward. Living under chronic scarcity trains the nervous system to privilege immediacy over reflection. In such contexts, escalation often feels safer than restraint, because restraint presumes a future that has rarely proven reliable.
This is why I suggested that our team read, The Poverty Problem: How Education Can Promote Resilience and Counter Poverty’s Impact on Brain Development and Functioning by Horacio Sanchez. What I value in Sanchez’s work is its refusal to moralize. Poverty is not framed as a failure of character or values, nor is it reduced to cultural difference. Instead, Sanchez situates poverty squarely in the realm of neurodevelopment. Chronic stress alters brain functioning. Executive skills weaken under prolonged threat. Emotional regulation becomes fragile. In this framing, what schools often label as misbehavior appears instead as adaptation: effective in one context, destructive in another.
Years ago, I encountered related ideas through the work of Ruby Payne. Her articulation of the “hidden rules” of class helped me, at the time, to recognize how easily educators misinterpret behavior through their own assumptions. That framework had value. But with distance, I have grown wary of how readily it can slide into essentialism. When poverty becomes a typology, students are reduced to traits rather than understood as people shaped by conditions. Sanchez’s contribution feels corrective. Poverty is not who students are; it is what has happened to them over time.
Schools, however, are poorly designed to hold this complexity. As systems, they are built for compliance. Behavior is treated as an isolated variable to be managed rather than as evidence to be interpreted. Order and compliance becomes synonymous with success. When disruption occurs, the response is procedural: identify the infraction, assign the consequence, restore calm. The system functions efficiently, but shallowly. The deeper causes of trauma, poverty, developmental interruption are rarely addressed because they resist standardization and slow the machinery down.
This is where Manet’s painting becomes something close to diagnosis. The boy is dressed for authority. He holds a sword that signifies adulthood, power, and consequence. Yet his posture is tentative, his body misaligned with the role he is meant to inhabit. Schools do this constantly. They place adult consequences in the hands of children who were never adequately prepared to carry them. Discipline records, suspensions, legal accountability: these are swords. Once handed over, they cannot be easily set aside. When harm occurs, the weapon eclipses the child who is still learning how to stand.
This is why I believe so strongly in restorative practices. I am careful with that language. I do not mean restorative discipline, which too often functions as a softer form of punishment within the same compliance-based logic. Restorative practices represent a fundamentally different orientation. They ask different questions: What happened? Who was harmed? What is needed to repair the damage and prevent it from happening again? These questions assume that behavior is relational and developmental, not merely willful.
Restorative practices are not permissive. If anything, they are exacting. They require individuals to confront the impact of their actions rather than passively absorb punishment. They require systems to tolerate ambiguity and discomfort rather than default to exclusion. Most importantly, they recognize that regulation must come before cognition. When the nervous system is in a state of threat, moral reasoning is inaccessible. Punitive responses escalate that threat. Restorative practices slow the moment down, creating enough safety for reflection to become possible.
What continues to draw me to restorative practices is their refusal to collapse identity into behavior. Harm is named clearly, but the individual is not reduced to the act. Responsibility is held within relationship, where learning can still occur. Belonging is not treated as a reward for good behavior; it is understood as the condition that makes growth possible at all. This directly challenges systems shaped by scarcity and control, systems that rely on removal rather than repair.
Manet leaves his boy unresolved, suspended between authority and unreadiness. Restorative practices refuse that stasis. They treat conflict not as evidence of failure, but as a moment of instruction. As a rupture that can either harden into identity or open into growth. I do not romanticize this work. It is slow, uneven, and often incomplete. Repair does not guarantee transformation. But it is developmentally honest in a way compliance never is.
Until schools are willing to prioritize understanding over order and formation over obedience, they will continue to reproduce the very behaviors they seek to eliminate. We will keep asking young people to carry swords they did not forge and punishing them when the weight proves too much. Restorative practices, at the very least, attempt something more humane: they create the possibility that the sword can be set down, and that what replaces it might be skill, language, and relationship rather than fear.