I tend to be very protective of people. In my career I encountered far too many children who had already been so broken by adults that is was almost impossible to piece them back together. Nonetheless I always attempted to help abused youngsters at least for the time that they were in my care. The stories that I heard about them and from them were heartbreaking and often resulted in sleepless night for me as I worried for their futures. Teaching such lost souls almost always made me grateful for my own good fortune in having loving and generous parents who daily made it clear to me that I was more important to them than anything else. 

I encountered thousands of students over the course of my career. Most of them came from good families that may have been lacking in money but were devoted to their welfare. The children enduring neglect and sometimes even physical and mental abuse are the ones that I remember the most. Their tortured stories still haunt me as I wonder how they are doing and if they managed to overcome the traumas of their childhoods. 

I suppose that I will never fully understand how a grown individual is so selfish that he or she would hurt a child and yet I witnessed so many horror stories. Sometimes I even wonder if there were cases in which children had learned so well how to adapt and present good fronts that I never knew how seriously toxic their lives were. I suspect that there were many who were suffering in silence. It was the ones screaming for help with their horrid behaviors who broke my heart. 

I’ll never forget the young boy threatening to slash open his throat with a pair of scissors while I attempted to talk him out of his suicide plan. With a quick maneuver I managed to outwit him and grab his weapon. He then broke down and melted into my arms. He left for psychiatric help and I learned the true horror of his existence. He had been set on fire by his mother who attempted to kill him when he was only three years old. He came back when he was well and thanked me for helping him and loving him and then he left. I still think of him and wonder if life worked out for him. He would be in his fifties now if he survived. 

There was also the set of twins who lived in a junkyard with a weak mother and a brutal father. Their story was akin to that of Cain and Abel. One brother was a bully who often harmed his sweet sibling. Their mother had no idea how to control the boys because she herself was being brutalized by her husband. Her solution was simply to leave one day while the boys were in school, never to return again or even to tell them goodbye. The bully is presently in prison and I don’t know what became of her meeker brother. I shudder to think of the horrors that they must have seen when they were young and impressionable. Later one of them would emulate the behaviors that he had witnessed from his father. The circle of violence would repeat itself.

There was the little girl whose mother irrationally decided that the innocent child was the source of all of the family’s difficulties. She favored the rest of her daughters but blamed her woes on my student who was in fact quiet and studious, seemingly a model of goodness. She shaved the girl’s head in a pique of anger and made her wear hand me down clothes that did not fit. Somehow the youngster persisted in her determination to learn so that she might one day have the knowledge and skills to leave the situation and make her own way in the world. 

I could fill a book with story after story of a parent or parents abandoning or abusing children. Some of their victims cracked. Some adopted brutal responses of their own. Some went inside themselves. Some created false stories about their situations as though telling a fairytale about who they were would wash away the reality of their hellish lives. Others saw a way out through education, persisting in spite of the horror that was in their homes. 

We worry about so many issues that are actually unimportant while too often ignoring the children who live unloved and abused. It is easier to look the other way when we see the signs that they are in trouble. We are able to make excuses because their behaviors are so audacious and unsavory. We blame them for their reactions to supreme neglect from their parents. We wash our hands in frustration believing that they are already doomed and there is nothing we might do to change that fact. All too often they have given up on themselves as well. 

Only love will turn around a life. Our most basic need is to feel safe and so many children do not know what that means. Kindness is missing in their lives but it does not have to be that way. Instead of being exasperated with their misdeeds we have an opportunity to help them by showing that we truly care about them. I have found that simply letting a child know that he or she is loved changes the trajectory of life.  

I once had a student who was a pain in the neck for all of his teachers. He was haughty, arrogant, exceedingly brilliant but also almost criminally disruptive. I often kept him in my classroom when nobody else wanted him around. I reshaped his behaviors with logic, catering to his intelligence, making him feel truly seen. He was good student when he was in my class. We had a great relationship, but somehow he was unable to transfer his changes to other teachers. The last I heard from him he had dropped out of school and was kicking around from one job to another. 

Years passed and one day when I went to vote in an election a handsome young man came over to address me. He reminded me of who he was and told me that even in his darkest moments he had remembered how I had encouraged him and liked him. He decided to turn his life around, to use the talents that I had pointed out to him. He went back to school first earning a high school diploma then going to college and finally law school. He said that anytime his road became rocky he told himself that he was good and capable. He said he heard my voice in his mind urging him to keep moving forward, to forgive himself when he would backslide for a moment. Then he gave me a big hug.

We never know when something that we do or say will literally save or redirect a life. If we genuinely care about every person that we encounter we are certain to be the change that we wish to see in the world. It may be our smile that makes a difference or maybe just our earnest belief in the possibilities of every human will be enough to lift someone from the junk heap of their experiences. Whatever the case, we must all try. The future should belong to everyone and it begins with the children, even the ones who appear to be impossibly bad.