I convinced a fellow student that had a severe run-away problem to stop running away, once and for all.
He had been bolting from the after-school campus daily, sometimes getting 6 blocks away before a teacher would catch him. When they did apprehend him, he would be brought back by force, kicking and screaming. This kid was always acting out, throwing huge tantrums, injuring himself. He was kinda fucked up I guess.
One day I took it upon myself to talk him into returning to campus on his own. I simply talked to him like a friend and calmed him down, told him running away wasn’t going to solve anything, and that we wouldn’t get in trouble when we returned because we’d tell them we had just been pretending to run-away that time.
I’ve always been proud of that accomplishment, considering I was only 7 years old at the time.
Funny epilogue: Twenty years later, my father dated his mother for a good three or four years. He almost became my step-brother.