What my childhood special self-control class taught me about parenting wiggly kids today
Last week, I knelt down by my 7-year-old’s desk to pull out his crumpled math homework, and the tiny, crinkled sticker I’d kept tucked in my old planner for 25 years slipped out onto the floor. It was a yellow smiley face dotted with peeling glitter, and the text read “I Sat Still For 10 Whole Minutes”. For a second, I was 6 again, sitting cross-legged on the gym storage floor with a bag of cheese crackers in my lap, waiting for Mrs. Henderson to start our Wednesday after-school class.
I was the wiggliest kid in my first grade class. I tapped my pencil so hard and so constantly that the whole row would bounce along with my rhythm during reading time. I crawled under my desk during math tests when my legs got too restless to stay crossed. I got sent to the principal’s office twice in one month for getting up to sharpen my pencil 10 times in 45 minutes. Back in the early 1990s, my school didn’t have the wide range of support options we talk about now. Instead of a 504 plan or ADHD evaluation, my teacher suggested I join the school’s special after-school “Self-Control Class” – the one for kids who couldn’t seem to sit still or stay quiet when they were supposed to.
My mom thought it was ridiculous at first. “You don’t need a special class to learn to sit,” she told me over dinner that night. “You just need to listen.” But she agreed to let me go, because I’d started coming home every day crying that I was “bad at school” and didn’t want to go back.
The class was only three of us, held in the back storage room of the gym every Wednesday for 12 weeks. The first thing that surprised me was that we didn’t start with sitting. We started with moving. Mrs. Henderson dragged an old beat-up trampoline out of the corner, and we took turns jumping as high as we could for 10 minutes. Or we raced up and down the bleachers, or stretched until our fingers brushed the low ceiling of the storage room. Only after that did we practice sitting. We started at two minutes, worked our way up to four, then six, then 10. If you made it, you got a sticker for your book. If you wiggled too much and had to get up early, you didn’t get in trouble. Mrs. Henderson just smiled and said, “Your body told you it needed that. Let’s reset and try again in 30 seconds.”
By the end of the 12 weeks, I had a whole book full of stickers, and I stopped getting sent to the principal’s office. I didn’t think much of that old class for almost 20 years, until I started getting the same emails from my son’s second grade teacher that my first grade teacher sent my mom: He’s tapping too loud. He gets up 15 times a class. He’s distracting the other kids.
I’ll admit, I panicked at first. I started researching expensive after-school behavior programs, filled out the paperwork for an evaluation, and spent three nights scrolling parenting forums worrying I’d missed something big. Then I cleaned out my old planner to make space for my son’s school schedule, and that 10-minute sticker fell out. That’s when I remembered what that weird little special class actually taught me that no forum or evaluation had told me yet.
The first thing I changed was that I stopped demanding he be still before he’s had a chance to move. Mrs. Henderson never made us sit before we got all our wiggles out first, so that’s what I do now. Every morning before school, we set aside 8 minutes for what we call “crazy movement”: He jumps on our backyard trampoline, chases our beagle around the block, or does 20 cartwheels on the front lawn. Before he sits down to do homework after school, he gets 10 minutes to run around outside or build a crazy marble run that gets all his energy out. I bought a $20 wobble stool for his desk, so he can wiggle as much as he wants while he works without distracting anyone. If he’s mid-spelling test and starts bouncing off the walls, I don’t nag him to sit still. I just say “go do five jumping jacks and come back.” It takes 30 seconds, and he’s ready to focus again.
The second thing I learned is that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. A lot of the advice I see treats sitting still like a skill you either have or you don’t, and if your kid doesn’t have it, something’s wrong. But in that class, wiggling wasn’t bad behavior. It was just information: your body needs movement. I started asking my son “what does your body need right now?” instead of “why can’t you behave?” Sometimes he says he needs to stand up while he works. Sometimes he says he needs a snack. Sometimes he just needs to wiggle for a minute. Last month, his teacher told me he’d started asking to leave the room for one minute to stretch when he feels wiggly, and he comes back ready to work. No fuss, no distraction.
I’m not saying this works for every kid, or that it replaces the support kids with ADHD or other learning differences need. I know every kid is different, and there are times when more formal support is exactly what a family needs. But for us, that little special class I took when I was 6 gave me a framework that doesn’t require a lot of money or a lot of extra time. It just requires shifting how you think about wiggles: they’re not misbehavior, they’re just what a kid’s body does.
Last weekend, my son found my old sticker book in the attic while we were looking for my old childhood bike. He flipped through it, laughed at the glittery smiley stickers, and asked if he could start his own sticker book for when he listens to his body. I bought him a pack of dinosaur stickers last week, and he’s got five on the cover already. It’s not a perfect fix – we still get the occasional email about too much tapping, and some days he just can’t focus no matter how much jumping we do. But it’s working for us, far better than any expensive program I almost signed him up for. All it took was remembering that weird little special class I took when I was little, and the yellow glittery sticker I’ve kept all these years.
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