No Doors, No Locks, and a Village on Fire: A Real Conversation About Boundaries

Some of the best conversations in our program start with something small. Last week it started with doors. Or rather, the lack of them.

We were building, and someone noticed that none of our buildings had doors.

“Oh, so there’s no privacy.”

“Anyone could break in.”

“I’ll make a jail for the criminals.”

“Who wants to be police chief?”

And just like that, a building project turned into a conversation about privacy, safety, and what it means to protect a space you’ve worked hard on.

A village built together

We talked about how good the last few weeks had been. No destruction in the realm. Real teamwork. The kids even built a house just for me to decorate, and when I accidentally broke a few bricks along the way, they jumped in to help me place things back. It felt like we had a genuine village going, built by all of us together.

Then it hit exactly 5:30, when our session ends.

For some kids, that’s a hard stop. Screen time is up, and they log off right away. For others, it kicks off a scramble, everyone talking at once, trying to figure out who’s allowed to stay on a little longer and who has to go now that I’m about to leave the call. Three kids logged off the Google Meet.

And that’s exactly when the village started to burn.

“Who is setting fire?”

“We worked so hard on this.”

“Hold on, I’m putting it out.”

“Ms. Victoria, put [him] on visitor mode. I can see him setting fire to Hunter Town.”

That request, coming from the kids themselves and not from me, is exactly why visitor mode has become one of my favorite tools in this program.

What visitor mode actually teaches

In Minecraft, visitor mode lets a kid stay in the realm, but they can’t place or break blocks. I use it to stop things in their tracks. It’s not about locking someone out. It’s a chance to reset, to get them on camera, and to talk through what’s actually going on underneath the behavior.

In the first few sessions, kids almost always experience visitor mode as a punishment. It’s hard for them at first. That’s actually where some of the best conversations happen, because it opens the door to talking about boundaries. What does it feel like when someone crosses a line you’ve set? How do you set that line in the first place?

Here’s the part that gets me every time. There’s a real shift that happens over the course of the program. Visitor mode stops being something I hand out as the adult in the room, and starts being something the kids ask for from each other. They’re not yelling “you broke my rule.” They’re using a word they’ll carry with them into high school, college, and eventually the workforce.

Boundary.

Sessions don’t always end clean

It always stings when a session ends without resolution. The kid who set the fire had already logged off, so we couldn’t ask him why in the moment. Was everything going too well and he needed to shake things up a little? Was it impulsivity? Is there something else going on, maybe being on the other end of some teasing we don’t know about yet? I don’t have the answer, and I won’t pretend to.

What I do know is that next week, we start right here. We’ll pick the conversation back up, and this time he’ll be on the call to be part of it.

Why did he start the fire?

Do our buildings have doors?

Do we keep them closed?

Can we lock them?

And maybe the biggest question of all: do we even need a jail, or is visitor mode enough?