Who Was in the Wrong Here? A Teacher’s View on Kids’ Conflicts
It was a Thursday afternoon during free choice, the kind of moment that looks chaotic to anyone walking in but actually has a rhythm I’ve learned to read. On the rug, two boys—Jack and Theo—were building with the oversized red blocks. I saw Jack lean over and knock down Theo’s tower. Theo immediately shoved Jack. Jack fell sideways into a bookshelf and started to cry.
I separated them and knelt down.
“He broke my tower,” Theo said.
“He hit me,” Jack sobbed.
That was true. But I also saw the part before it.
Jack’s version didn’t mention the block tower. Theo’s version didn’t mention the shove after. Both boys described the world from where they were standing, and both were leaving out the bit where they were not entirely innocent. That’s normal. You can’t expect a five-year-old to say, “I antagonized him and then he retaliated, but we both had a role in it.” They simply don’t have that kind of self-awareness.
Years ago, I would have tried to sort that out in the moment. Now I just sat between them and said, “Theo, you were angry because your tower came down. And Jack, your arm still hurts. Let’s both take a minute.”
That’s when I noticed Jack’s mother at the classroom door.
Sarah had come early to drop off a folder. She’d seen the end of the altercation—her son crying, Theo sitting with his arms crossed. She didn’t see Jack knock over the tower. To her, this was simple: Theo had hit her child. The question wasn’t complicated.
“Is Theo going to be held accountable?” she said once we were in the hallway.
I explained that I had seen both boys make choices that contributed, and that I was going to help them work through it. Sarah looked at me, genuinely puzzled.
“So you’re saying Theo was in the wrong too?”
I said I was saying they both were. And then she asked the question I get asked at least once a week: “But who was in the wrong here?”
That question feels so natural to ask as a parent. You want to know who to protect, who to correct, who to talk to. You want a name. You want a single story. But child development doesn’t work that way—especially not in early elementary, when impulse control is still under construction and emotions hit the body before the brain can process them.
Jack knocked over Theo’s tower not because he’s cruel, but because he wanted attention or he was bored or he didn’t check his own body. Theo shoved Jack not because he has a mean streak, but because he felt attacked and reacted in the only way his body knew how. The “wrong” wasn’t so much a person as a sequence of missed steps. Both needed to learn how to pause.
I’ve found that the best response to that question isn’t a judgment. It’s a shift in direction.
Instead of “Who started it?” I ask the kids, “What happened right before the shouting?” Not to catch anyone in a lie, but to help them see that conflicts build like a stack of dominoes. The first domino might be a look, a grab, a comment. Then the next. Then the push. There’s rarely a single starting point.
At home, a similar approach works. When your child says, “He hit me for no reason,” ask, “What happened right before he hit you?” You don’t have to make excuses for the hittest. But you’ll likely find your child was holding a match, too. Then you can talk about choices on both sides.
A few weeks after that Thursday, Sarah volunteered to help with a birthday party in our classroom. I had set up stations—coloring, a small LEGO bin, and a table for cupcakes. Jack and Theo ended up beside each other, same table, as kids tend to do.
The plate of cupcakes held exactly fourteen, and fifteen kids showed up that day. I hadn’t counted well. The last one sat in the center of the table. Both Jack and Theo reached for it at the same moment. Jack was faster. Theo’s face crumbled.
Sarah stepped in immediately. “Jack, you took that without waiting your turn. Theo was there first.” She pointed to Theo. “It should be yours.”
I watched Jack’s eyes turn wet. He hadn’t intentionally skipped a turn. He’d just grabbed—impulse, not intention. And Theo, who had absolutely been about to grab too, now looked like the rightful owner.
I came over and knelt between them. From a distance, it might have looked like I was placating a couple of cupcake-obsessed six-year-olds. That’s fine. “I see two kids who both want the last cupcake,” I said. “The trouble is there’s only one. What should we do here?”
Theo said, “We could split it.”
Jack said, “Or have a race.”
I said, “That works. But who’s bringing the next batch?”
They both laughed. Sarah took a breath.
Later, she told me, “I thought I was defending Theo. But maybe I just needed to blame Jack because he reminded me of my instinct to protect kids who get overlooked.” She was honest enough to say she didn’t know if she was right.
I don’t think about that day as a lesson with a neat moral. There was no apology from Jack’s side, no dramatic apology from Theo either. There was just a small moment where two kids realized they weren’t enemies, and one mom started to see a broader picture.
Sarah still asks me questions from time to time. Yesterday she came to me at drop-off and said, “We were at the playground, and there’s a boy who always snatches the ball from Jack. I was about to tell the mom her son needs to learn sharing. But then I realized Jack had the ball for an hour before, and the other kid hadn’t had a turn at all. So who was in the wrong?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. I don’t think there is one, most of the time. But the fact that she stopped to ask at all—that was the win.
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