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Shaker Heights resident Lisa Hamilton shares her family’s experience at Hanna Perkins School

I am Lisa Hamilton, and I am a very proud parent of two alums of Hanna Perkins – because we have twins. We came to Hanna Perkins for my son, and we brought his twin sister along just for the ride, or so we thought.

I found these two letters – you will not believe this – the twins wrote when they were here at Hanna Perkins, and I thought I would share them with you.

“Dear Mama and Daddy” – this is June 3rd, 2004 – “I love you very much. I really very much love you so much. I wish I could go to Florida to Disney World to see Mickey Mouse and Minnie. And I wish I could go to my grandma’s house. Goofy is at my grandma’s house. I like trains, too.” Here’s the kicker: “Jalen hit me. And I didn’t hit her back.”

 

So that was my son. And then the other one, I wish you could see this, it says:

“I hate you.” And there is a heart with a squiggly line down the middle, and mom is on one side and my daughter is on the other. And then there’s a stick figure with hands on her hips. Every parent – you guys are laughing, so it sounds like this is familiar. In the inside, however, it says: “Dear mom, I love you so much, but when it comes to you telling me what to do, and I don’t want to do it, I start getting mad. So when I get mad, when you tell me what to do, these are the things… the list of things … I will do to calm me down.

“Number one, I will remember to say, ‘Even though I don’t want to do it, I can still manage.'”

That is Hanna Perkinese if you guys don’t know that.

“Number two, I will calm myself down before I get out of control. Number three, I will take deep breaths and hold it in until I’m finished, and that means I will not complain. These are the things I will do so I don’t get in trouble and so I can do what you want me to do without getting mad.”

 

And that, my friends, is the power of Hanna Perkins. And I can sit down, but I’m not. OK, one more thing. Before we came to Hanna Perkins, and this is a personal story, my son was struggling. And any parent knows that when your child is struggling, you are struggling. He was hitting his classmates. He was throwing things at his teachers. He was standing on tables and pretty soon my son was kicked out of preschool.

But when we met our Family Helper at Hanna Perkins, she would always say, “Hanna Perkins can help with that.” And I kept thinking, how are they going to help? We tried everything.

And after we started our Hanna Perkins journey, it became very clear to me just how they would help us. Now, I’m not proud of what I’m about to tell you, but I wanted to share my truth with you. I spanked my children. And Hanna Perkins showed me that by spanking my children, I was not only harming them emotionally, but I was also doing them a grave disservice by stopping them instead of giving them the tools to identify the feelings and manage themselves.

And what became especially clear to me in that moment is that if I didn’t give my son the tools to manage his big feelings, he was always going to require someone to stop him. And that would either be me, a teacher, or as he got older, the police. And realizing my experience of black males and the police, I was terrified.

So I was willing to stop spanking my son to help my son. So we became a no-spanking household and allowed Hanna Perkins to not only give the gift of managing self to our children, but also to me.

My intention in sharing my personal journey with you tonight is to help you understand that Hanna Perkins not only empowers children, but they transform families. And the Hamilton family is forever grateful. Thank you.