When my children were in kindergarten, they had a teacher who specialised in what I can only describe as an extremely curated performance of niceness—a kind of plasticky, high-fructose charm that made my skin crawl and my muscles tense from the moment I entered the room.
Her voice slowed to a sing-song drawl as she delivered instructions with exaggerated cheer—Now children, please remember to place your coats in the coat room before you proceed to your desks—as if each sentence had been sugar-dusted and slow-baked for maximum palatability, a script rehearsed down to the tilt of her head and the angle of her smile.
She never really acknowledged me: the children were her focus. I would ask gentle, concrete questions in a soft and interested tone, and she would either respond with mechanical deflection or simply ignore my voice entirely, as if collaboration with parents had never once been discussed in any faculty meeting, as if she were the lone captain of a ship made of laminated routines and behaviour charts. And still—somehow, bafflingly—my children liked her. More than made sense to me.
Consistency as safety, even when it cuts
Years later, I asked them why. I asked what they saw in her, what felt good, what made them feel safe. And they told me something I had missed entirely, something that made me stop mid-thought and sit with it like a pebble under the skin: she was consistent. The rules were clear. The expectations were always the same. They knew what to do and what came next. And even if she was fake, or overly sweet, or too rigid with her lines, she never cracked. She never snapped. She never startled them with a flash of chaos or an unpredictable shift in mood.
Other teachers, they said—teachers I had liked better, or found more human, or enjoyed talking to—those teachers sometimes cracked. They snapped under pressure or showed flashes of frustration or treated one student unfairly and then pretended they hadn’t. And that unpredictability—those human, overloaded, flickering moments—felt worse than the stiffness of a saccharine routine.
To me, the mask felt hostile. To them, it felt safe.
Children form bonds even inside harm
What astonishes me now, as I look back with fuller vision and many more years between then and now, is how much children are capable of holding at once. They do not cleave easily into categories of like and dislike, safe and unsafe, good and bad. They form relationships inside contradictions. They stay open longer than we think. Even with teachers who hurt them, my children often continued to hope. They built attachment out of small moments of effort. They forgave so much.
In later grades, the teachers they loved most were sometimes the most chaotic—the ones who were trying their best and fucking up in real time, the ones who missed something critical but showed up the next day with an open heart, the ones who failed in one area but succeeded in another that mattered more. My children felt the difference between someone who was harsh because they had given up and someone who stumbled because they were overwhelmed and unsupported. And they responded with nuance, even when I felt fury.
They knew when someone was trying. They knew when someone cared.
The problem was never one person
It wasn’t a single teacher who failed them. It was never that simple. It was the absence of enough adults, the impossibility of care stretched too thin, the exhaustion that made kindness brittle and responsiveness delayed. It was the way systems forgot to fund humanity. It was the way meetings replaced materials. It was the way support was spoken about in theory while resource teachers were assigned twenty-seven IEPs and no time.
Even the teachers I didn’t like—teachers who baffled me or dismissed me or acted as if my children were puzzles rather than people—were sometimes the source of stories my kids brought home with laughter or pride. A weird lesson, a funny voice, a mistake that turned into something memorable. It was rarely all good or all bad.
And that’s what makes this part of the story so hard to tell in clean lines.
It wasn’t one sharp break
The way we arrived here—this place of heartbreak and advocacy and slow-burning grief—was not through one violent fracture but through a thousand small failings that accumulated quietly, incrementally, until the weight became unbearable. It was the school year that started strong and then fell apart by January. It was the EA who disappeared and was never replaced. It was the counsellor who made promises enacted just a few times. It was the team that gave strategies that no one used.
It was the slow car crash, the kind that unfolds over years, the kind that seems survivable until you realise your child is no longer eating breakfast or smiling in the morning or trusting their own interpretation of reality. And by then, you’re pulling debris from their body that didn’t look like injury at first. By then, you’re trying to remember when the impact began.
What I see in the afterward
In the afterward, when the adrenaline recedes and the routines become relics, I can finally see how strange it was to be in those classrooms—how strange it was to watch someone behave like an automaton of warmth while erasing my presence entirely, how strange it was to feel like an intruder in the place where my child spent most of their day. But I can also see how much my children managed to take from even the strangest situations. How they built meaning. How they adapted. How they found small pockets of joy inside a system that gave them so little room to be fully themselves.
It would be easier, in some ways, to blame one person. To say this teacher or that principal or that one moment was the thing that tipped us. But the truth is slower and heavier and more widely distributed. The truth is that schools failed because staff were too few and expectations were too high. Because structure was demanded but support withheld. Because kindness is exhausting when you never get a break.
The ones who burn out first are the ones who care most
This, I think, is the point. This is the unspeakable truth that lives beneath so many school-based breakdowns, so many lost teachers, so many stories of near-misses and actual harms: that the teachers who could have changed everything—the ones who were brilliant, intuitive, truly alive in the classroom—were often the ones who burned out first. The ones who felt too much. The ones who could see how exclusion harms the body, how lack of support erodes trust, how certain children disappear unless someone makes the effort to truly see them.
These were the teachers who never stopped paying attention. And paying attention, in a system this broken, comes with a cost.
When you are sensitive to mood, to fairness, to subtle shifts in a child’s voice or posture, when you cannot ignore the deep emotional violence of watching a student spiral without enough help in the room—when you carry all of that internally, and your day contains no pause, no breathing space, no emotional regulation time, no time to be—you break. And when you do, the system will not catch you. The system will replace you with a smile and a script.
And that’s what happened.
My children’s kindergarten teacher had a formula. She followed it precisely. She was consistent, predictable, controlled. And that created a kind of safety—if not creativity, if not deep attachment, then at least a feeling of order, a sense of what came next. But that formula existed because the conditions were hostile to real responsiveness. The formula worked because the structure was too rigid to allow for mess.
So yes, my children relatively safe with her. But the ones who could have given them more—the ones who were messy and vivid and able to build trust even through failure—those teachers were the ones who eventually cracked. They were left alone too long, unsupported too often, overworked too continuously.
The real problem was never the teacher. The problem was what the system demanded of them. The problem was—and still is—the fucking lack of resources.
