My Son Said School Is “Breaking My Arms”—What I Learned About Restraint Policies
One Tuesday in October, my son Alex came out of the car with his backpack half unzipped and said, “My school is breaking my arms for when I am a bad person.” I almost drove over the curb. He said it the way other kids say “my teacher gave me a sticker” or “I lost my library card.”
I parked the car and turned around. “What do you mean, buddy?”
He shrugged. “They break your arms at school if you’re bad.”
My heart was doing something I don’t want to describe. I thought of hospital visits. I thought of calling a lawyer. I thought of walking into that school building and pulling him out before morning recess. I was already composing the email in my head when I asked the next question.
“Who breaks your arms?”
He looked at me like I had missed the whole point. “The teachers. They use a ‘give me your arm’ hold.”
That stopped me. “What hold?”
He couldn’t explain it. He just showed me, grabbing his own wrist with his other hand and tugging. “They hold you like this so you can’t punch. Then they ‘walk you to the safe room.'”
I had to sit down. So that was it. Not a literal arm-breaking, but something that felt like an arm-breaking to a six-year-old who had been acting out at school since the first day of kindergarten.
The school had a behavior intervention system. I knew that. There was a “calm room” in the back of his classroom where kids went when they were dysregulated. The phrase “dysregulated” was used a lot in the parent handbook. But nobody ever told me what happened once a kid got to that room.
I called the school the next morning. I tried to keep my voice level. “We need to talk about the hold that was used on Alex yesterday. He says his arm was pulled.”
The secretary didn’t pause. “The principal will call you back.”
The principal called back within the hour. She was calm and matter-of-fact, the way principals have to be. She told me that Alex had been hitting another child, and that the teacher’s aide had used a seated “chair hold” to keep him from escalating. It was a trained physical restraint technique. His arms were held at his sides, she said, for about two minutes, until he settled. Then he went to the calm room and did a breathing exercise.
“Did his arm hurt?” I asked.
“There’s usually some soreness,” she said. “The point is to protect everyone. The hold is not a punishment.”
Which was the exact problem. To Alex, it was a punishment. He didn’t know that he was being restrained to keep other children safe. He just knew that a grown-up grabbed him, held his arms hard, and took him somewhere quiet. And then somebody probably said something about “making good choices.” Meanwhile, his brain was doing what six-year-old brains do: he turned it into a story about the school breaking his arms because he was bad.
The more I asked around, the more I learned. I found out the school uses a specific physical restraint program called CPI. That’s Crisis Prevention Intervention. It’s not secret. It’s a gray binder in the front office, and any parent can look at it. But nobody looks at it unless something happens.
I did. It’s full of photos of adults holding padded wedges, elbow locks, and wrist grips. It’s technical and careful. It’s also terrifying when you imagine your child on the receiving end.
Here’s what surprised me: Alex was not upset about the restraint. He was upset about the frame. The story he built around it. He had decided the school was allowed to hurt him if he was a bad person. That’s a huge idea for a little kid to carry around. No amount of positive reinforcement at home fixes that if the school experience keeps reinforcing it.
So I did three things. First, I asked for a copy of the school’s discipline and restraint policy. Not a summary—the actual policy. I sat with it for an evening. It was eleven pages long. Second, I requested a meeting with his teacher and the aide who performed the hold. I asked them to walk me through what happens from the moment Alex throws a block to the moment he’s back in his seat. Third, I asked the school counselor what she actually said to Alex while he was sitting in that calm room.
That last one was the most helpful. She told me she uses a script. “Your body is having a hard time right now. I’m here. We can try again when your body feels calmer.” She says it in a low voice, no discussion, no lecture about behavior. She does this every time.
So Alex didn’t need a lecture. He needed the adults to speak in a way that matched what his body was feeling. The hold was briefly overwhelming. The calm room was fine. But the thing that stuck in his head was the meaning of it: “Bad person.” Where did he learn that phrase? Probably from a parent or a teacher at some point—maybe here? Maybe from a show? Or maybe he just built it himself because the whole experience had no other explanation to offer him.
What helped the most was very simple. We practiced what a safe adult is supposed to do. I sat next to Alex on the couch and said, “If a grown-up ever holds you, you can say ‘that hurts’ and they have to stop and check your body. If they won’t stop, you tell me.” We did that over and over. He started saying it at dinner. “That hurts. You have to stop.”
I don’t know if it made him safer. But I know he stopped saying the school was breaking his arms.
If you’re a parent and you hear something like this from your kid, do the boring things first. Call the school and ask, in the least frantic voice you can manage, “Can you tell me specifically what physical interventions were used with my child today?” Don’t accept “we had a calm-down break.” Ask for details. Ask for the name of the hold. Ask if it was documented. Ask if you can see the incident report. Ask if there’s a debrief meeting scheduled. There should be one.
Also, ask the school to teach your child what to say. This was the gap. The staff had trained the restraint technique, but they hadn’t trained Alex’s language around it. He didn’t know the words “restraint,” “calm room,” “body check,” or “finish your work later.” He only had “break my arms” and “bad person.” That language gap turned a routine policy into something scary.
Alex is doing better now. Sort of. The holds still happen occasionally, because he still throws things when he’s frustrated. But now, afterwards, he’ll tell me, “They checked my arms and then I did my breathing.” That’s a huge difference. He still doesn’t love school, but he no longer thinks the adults there want to break him.
I asked the principal if they ever planned to tell kids, in advance, that physical holds exist and what they’re for. She paused and said, “That’s a really good question.” I don’t know if they’ll do it. But I’ll keep asking.
For now, the arms are fine. The story in his head is a little straighter. And I know what to ask the school next time, because there will be a next time. There always is.
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