“Feelings are like farts.”
That’s not a phrase you usually hear echoing through a school hallway—but this week, it made perfect sense. Dr. Chris Willard, psychologist, author, and Harvard Medical School faculty member, visited Brookwood on Tuesday to talk with parents about supporting kids through anxiety, stress, and emotional overwhelm. Later that morning, he read his latest children’s book, Feelings Are Like Farts!, to Lower School students, who delighted in the humor—and the honesty. The message? Feelings aren’t something to be bottled up. They’re natural, and naming them helps.
That same spirit showed up again yesterday, when Andrew Luman jokingly introduced Jean Skaane at School Meeting as our “Feelings Detective”—a nickname that instantly stuck. Jean spoke about the full spectrum of human emotion: happy, sad, angry, worried. She reminded us that these feelings don’t need to be fixed—they need to be felt. With her help, and in collaboration with Andrew, Alex, and Joe from our Music team, the school launched into a sing-along of Noah Kahan’s “Music’s There to Help You.” Third graders strummed ukuleles, sixth graders played guitar, and everyone joined in—singing a song that Kahan wrote as a nod to how music can carry us through hard times.
This is the kind of week that reminds us why wellness is one of the central threads in a Brookwood education. If children are going to do well, they need to feel well. And that means we create space not just for academics, but for naming what’s happening inside us—for honoring hard feelings and holding each other in them. That’s what we saw this week, and we’re so proud to be building a community where our students are learning how to feel, how to express, and how to care—for themselves and one another.
Warmly,
Jon Bartlett
Head of School
