Every child deserves a school that sees them. Not a generic version of who they should be, but who they actually are. For parents who have watched their child struggle, withdraw, or slowly stop believing in themselves, that gap between who a child is and what a school can hold can feel devastating.
In this episode of Learning Differently, hosts Lynna and Joie sit down with Jodie Patterson — author, social justice advocate, mother of five, and the first Black chair of the Human Rights Campaign. Jodie brings a perspective that is equal parts personal and urgent: what it looks like to raise a family of “contradictions,” how behavior is really a language most adults haven’t learned to read, and what parents need to know when a school is no longer serving their child.
Why Do Some Kids Withdraw, Rebel, or Refuse to Go to School?
When Jodie looks back on some of the hardest seasons with her children, the signs were there. She just didn’t have the language for them yet. Anger. Sadness. Anxiety. Nightmares. Refusing to get dressed in the morning. Pushing other kids. Behaviors that looked, on the surface, like a child acting out.
What she eventually understood was that her children weren’t misbehaving. They were responding to environments that weren’t built for them.
When a school thinks about a generic child — the average student, the expected profile, the box most kids are supposed to fit into — it works reasonably well for kids who fit that mold. But for the child who doesn’t, the mismatch shows up in the body before it ever shows up in words. Slumping. Hiding behind hair. Refusing to walk through the door. Jodie explains that these aren’t discipline problems, rather, they’re distress signals.
Jodie raised what she describes as a mini city: five children spanning multiple identities, languages, belief systems, and ways of moving through the world. Finding schools with the capacity to not just accept but genuinely nurture all of that was not simple. And when school fell short, her children told her not in words, but in everything else.
The question worth asking isn’t “Why is my child acting this way?” It’s “What is this environment asking of my child that they simply cannot give?”
What Is My Child’s Behavior Really Telling Me?
For a long time, Jodie Patterson tried to fix what she was seeing with cleaner diets, reading, and offering more affirmation. She was responding to circumstances when what was actually happening was something much deeper: an internal conversation her child was having about identity, about who they were, about the gap between how the world was seeing them and how they knew themselves to be.
It wasn’t until she slowed down and stopped trying to fix that she started to actually hear.
She describes sitting on the floor, at her child’s level, and asking a simple question: what’s really wrong? And that’s when everything started to open up.
Behavior, she has come to understand, is a language. There is toddler language and adolescent language and the particular language of a child who does not yet have the words for what they’re carrying.
Most adults aren’t born fluent in all of it. You develop that fluency through proximity, through slowing down, and through being willing to remove your own story long enough to hear theirs.
What gets in the way, more often than not, is a parent’s own ego — the instinct to see a child’s behavior as a reflection of your own success or failure, rather than as a message being sent from the inside out. The shift Jodie describes is about asking better questions and listening like you mean it.
What Does a Safe School Environment Actually Look Like?
The word safe can feel soft to some people. But what Jodie is describing has nothing soft about it. For Jodie, safety means room for a child to exist without spending the bulk of their mental energy buffering themselves from environments that don’t see them.
When a child has to navigate racism, sexism, or any other form of not-belonging before they can even begin to engage with the lesson in front of them, they are burning through cognitive and emotional resources that should be going toward learning.
Jodie points to her own experience attending an all-girls high school and college — environments where she didn’t have to think about her gender before thinking about the subject matter. The mental space that freed up was transformative. She learned how to write a paper the same year she had her first Black teacher, and she connects those two things directly.
What Jodie is describing, and what Fusion calls unconditional positive regard, is the belief that a child can show up in all their versions, messy and contradictory and still figuring it out, and be met with consistency, care, and belief.
Safe schools don’t just tolerate differences. They are built around it.
What Is Radical Parenting and How Can It Help My Family?
Radical parenting, as Jodie Patterson defines it, is not a philosophy that emerged from a book or a theory. It came from desperation. From a mom looking at her family (five kids with clashing beliefs, contradicting identities, and drastically different ways of seeing the world) and deciding: no one is getting lost on my watch.
The practice she developed is something she calls the lab. Whenever conflict arose in her household, the family would:
- Sit in a circle on the floor
- Pass a proverbial microphone
- Take turns speaking without interruption
Everyone got as long as they needed and the rules were simple: speak your truth, and listen while others speak theirs.
What came out of it wasn’t agreement. But after an hour or two of talking, the conversation would wind down and someone would say “Do you want to go play basketball?” And they would. They would eat together, sleep in the same rooms, and keep building a life side-by-side.
The goal, Jodie says, is not to agree. It is to disagree with decorum. To sit in close enough proximity to difference, for long enough, that it stops being threatening and starts being just… life.
That practice, she argues, belongs not just in homes but in classrooms, in boardrooms, anywhere people with vastly different starting points have to find a way to coexist and think critically together.
Is It Normal to Feel Grief When You Realize You Didn’t Understand Your Child?
Yes, it is normal to feel grief when you realize you don’t yet understand what your child is going through. And Jodie doesn’t flinch from it.
There are months, maybe years, that some parents look back on with a particular kind of sadness — the time before they understood. Before they had the language and before one child’s courage cracked everything open and made a new kind of seeing possible. That grief is real, and it deserves to be named.
For Jodie Patterson, the moment of transformation came when she realized that what her child was bringing to her wasn’t a behavior problem or a phase. It was identity: something happening in the brain and the heart that needed to be met.
As soon as she started learning, something shifted. She turned the mirror back on herself. If she was telling her child to be free, what was she doing with her own freedom?
That question changed her. And when she changed, every one of her children felt it. One by one, they came forward with the things they had been holding. The space she had opened for one child became a space for all of them.
What Are the Warning Signs That a School Is No Longer Right for Your Child?
Jodie’s framework here is straightforward, and it starts not with the school but with the child.
- First, observe. When something feels like it’s shifting, pay attention before you do anything else.
- Then, go to the school and look for one person who has the time to listen and the flexibility to think outside the box. If you can find that person, work with them. If you can’t (if every conversation leads back to policy, to rules, to what the school doesn’t allow) that’s your answer.
- And then keep reading the signs. Not whether your child is dressing the way you’d like, or getting every assignment in on time. The signs that matter are the ones that tell you whether life is moving forward or fading. Is your child sleeping? Eating? Are the nightmares getting fewer?
Those are the signs Jodie trusts. And when they start moving in the wrong direction, when the child’s spark is diminishing rather than growing, she doesn’t wait.
Her baseline, stated plainly, is this: she would rather say yes to her child than yes to a school. And if a school wants to be part of building a child up rather than fitting them into a box, there is room for partnership. But the child always comes first.
What Are Mirrors and Windows in Education and Why Do They Matter?
A safe school, Jodie says, looks like the children in it.
That means having enough people in the building — teachers, administrators, staff — who reflect the diversity of the students they serve. People whose experiences, identities, and perspectives give every child at least one person they can look at and feel, at some level, seen.
Jodie remembers her first Black teacher with complete clarity. Something in her relaxed. The mental space that opened up was the same year she learned to write a paper. Representation, she is saying, is a precondition for learning.
In education, this concept is often described as mirrors and windows:
- Mirrors are the people and stories that reflect a child back to themselves. The ones that say, someone like you exists, belongs, and matters here.
- Windows are the people and perspectives that open a child’s view outward, building the capacity for empathy, curiosity, and critical thinking about a world larger than their own experience.
The most powerful environments, Jodie and the hosts agree, offer both. And the most powerful people (parents, teachers, mentors) can sometimes be both at once: a reflection and an opening, depending on what a child needs in a given moment.
Is My Child in the Right School?
If your child is struggling or you just have a nagging feeling something isn’t right, you’re not alone, and there are answers.
Take our quick quiz to find out which type of school could be the right fit for your student. It’s not about labels. It’s about finding the environment where your child can finally be understood and begin to thrive.
