Bullying, Mean Girls, and Parenting

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/03/how_do_i_stop_myself_from_meddling_in_my_daughter_s_schoolyard_problems_.html

I read this article and I really liked it.  I love a lot of Slate's articles, but this one drew several, opposite, reactions from me and I like how it made me think and question how I feel about this topic.

I am a socially awkward person.  I am much better than I used to be, but in school I was painfully awkward.  I was bullied a lot in school, but I almost think I deserved to be.  Bullying is a horrible, painful experience.  But it is also society's way of telling you that your behavior is not appropriate for social settings.  I had many crushes in school, particularly middle school.  Because of my inexperience and lack of understanding of social rules I did not express my interest in those people appropriately.  In fact, if I were to have been in school today, in a more enlightened time, I may have faced disciplinary action for sexual harassment since I didn't understand that when someone says they are not interested, you need to leave them alone.  Base on what I read in Seventeen magazine and saw in romantic comedies, I believed if I just kept expressing my interest, eventually those people I was interested would magically become interested.  Unfortunately, I made my own middle school experience and the middle school experience of several boys I went to school with horrible.

I was bullied by boys who wanted me to leave them alone and didn't know how else to send that message.  I was ostracized by most everyone except for my most forgiving friends.  It was horrible and I wanted to kill myself often.  But because it was horrible, I was highly motivated not to repeat my mistakes as an adult, and I learned how to conduct myself (more) appropriately.

As a society, we've finally become aware of the epidemic bullying in schools has become.  However, we haven't figured out how to deal with it.

I am a former middle school teacher from a school where bullying was terrible.  The school knew that the bullying was interfering with their standardized test scores learning and was eager to fix the problem quickly. The implemented an anti-bullying program called Oelweus.  The teachers got one or two 45 minute training sessions on the program, and were given a script of how to lead class discussions on bullying.  The program consisted on helping students to identify what bullying was and wasn't, and what to do if they were being bullied or they saw someone being bullied.

This was great in theory, but in practice it was a disaster for me to teach.  The solutions were always to get an adult to intervene.  Which is great, but it seemed as though an adult in that situation could only treat the symptom of the bullying, not the cause.  The main reason bullying happens is because students don't like a kid.  Mostly its because a kid is not following the other kid's social norms.  Bullying is a form of social sanctions that are meant to get the kid to conform to the social norms.

Now we like to think student's shouldn't have to follow social norms, but really, most of the time they should.  For example, if a kid is getting bullied because he picks his nose and eats the boogers, well, he needs to learn not to do that.  So you can punish kids all day long for bullying the kid, or you can teach the kids the social skills he needs not to pick his nose.

Schools used to spend more time helping to develop kids socially, but in this day of high stake standardized tests, anything that isn't measured on a standardized test is thrown out the window.  This is causing kids who struggle socially to struggle even more, which leads to increased bullying, which, ironically causes kids to be so emotionally distraught they are not able to learn, which lowers test scores.

If we as a society really want to decrease bullying, rather than punishing kids that bully, wen need to spend more time showing and helping students learn how to live within society's written and unwritten rules.  One of those rules is forgiveness and second chances.

One problem is: in school you don't get a redo.  Once you've established yourself as socially maladroit, you are labelled that way forever.  School was painful because of that label, but I've been lucky enough to move several times, getting a do-over each time.  If we took the time to talk to kids, and model forgiveness, empathy, and understanding for them, students could learn social skills in a safe environment and we might start making some progress with getting bullying under control   The bully will learn appropriate, non-bullying behaviors, and the victim will learn appropriate actions that will not make them ostracized.