The word bully (which meant "sweetheart" around 1530) has taken on so much emotional baggage in the last decade or so, that it has become skewed. It is no longer a tool of communication, but a weapon.
I don't want to talk about bullying because it divides us. I have spent my adult life trying to minimize and be mindful of the word "bad". Little kids tell me about "bad" kids at school and I look at them blankly and pretend I don't know what that means because "I never met a bad kid. We all make bad choices from time to time."
I once had a little guy roll up his pant leg and show me a spot on his calf. "I'm only good to about here," he said. "The rest of me is bad."
If you feel bad, you act bad. Label a kid "bully" and that is what you'll get. Label a kid a victim and that is what you'll get. If you tell kids we're splitting up into teams, they'll quickly suss out which team meets more of their needs and join up.
When you tell kids they must stand up to bullying, you are asking them to choose a team, drawing a line down the middle of the playground, or the team, or the classroom.
I am tired of watching kids throw these words out so they can watch the adults fly into overdrive without really looking at the situation. I can think of one specific situation where a student with really weak social skills (but who was making progress with coaching) started to get feedback from his peers about the way he conducted himself in friendships with much younger kids. The boy, whose behaviour could easily have been interpreted as bullying at times, went home and reported that he was being bullied by those peers who tried (sometimes inappropriately) to hold him accountable for his treatment of younger children.
As soon as the word "bullying" came into play, the young man so in need of coaching, was off-limits to staff for anything but protection from those "bullying" him. The family was all too happy to lay the blame elsewhere and ignore the obvious problems.
There is no "we" in bullying, just "us" and "them". Anyone else have alarm bells going off? Us and them is the beginning of everything destructive in our society. We have a problem with how our children treat one another and we are not going to solve it by finding ways to constantly push away personal responsibility.
So, if we are going to get to Us, let's start with Me.
I am 47 years old and I have been a bully and a victim and everything in between. I am capable of selfless compassion, self-absorption, and careless cruelty. To ensure that I am never engaging in behavour that hurts others or myself, I choose to think of my behaviour in these terms: aggressive, assertive, passive.
Ideally, I want to be living in my own little bubble of assertiveness. That means (to me) that my bubble moves through my world with me safely in it. When I am beginning to impede the space of someone else (lack of awareness? bad day?), then the assertive person in the next bubble will simply let me know that I'm taking up more than my fair share of the available space. Oops, sorry, I say, and roll my bubble over a little. When the proximity of someone else's bubble makes me feel squished, I speak up and tell them, kindly, to move over.
Why can't this language replace the bully lexicon with older kids? Why can't we talk about the fact that we are always "behaving" and that the key to happiness is finding a balance and trying to monitor your own behaviour as much as possible. Accepting the nudges of others graciously is part of growing up - learning social skills. Understanding that we are all capable of all behaviours is the core of our compassion. Working together to create harmony is the essence of community. There is no community in "us" and "them".
When we find an inequality of balance, we need to investigate where it comes from. Aggressive kids are trying to meet a need. What is it? And how do we help them meet that need in a more appropriate way? How are we helping the aggressive child by shining the "bully" spotlight on them? When we do, we are likely exacerbating whatever created the behaviour in the first place.
I don't want to talk about bullying when there are better things to talk about. I want to talk about teaching the positive curriculum of human kindness. Let's spend money on Roots of Empathy and Zones of Regulation and the Focus Kit, to name only three of scores of curricula available to help kids develop compassion, self-awareness, and self-regulation.
Right now in our little school the grade 3,4,5 teacher and the school counsellor are delivering lessons to that class from the Zones of Regulation teaching program. The sense of community is actively nurtured every day in various ways. Built on this crucial foundation, discussions are developed regarding our feelings and how we help ourselves move from one "zone" to the next. And because there are no bad guys and good guys, everyone feels safe to explore their own strengths and vulnerable spots.
To address the little flickers of "bullying" behaviour that arise, the adults have been talking about aggressive, assertive, and passive behaviours with this analogy: Keep your remote control safely with you at all times. Don't leave it laying around so anyone can pick it up and push your buttons (passive), and never push the buttons on someone else's remote (aggressive). You are in charge of your remote. If you see one lying around, return it to the owner (You look like you're in the yellow zone. Don't forget to keep control of your remote. Why don't we go play?) If you see someone playing with someone else's remote, you could try to help or you could let an adult know.
What's important here is that everyone has a remote, everyone is tempted to play with one they don't own from time to time, and everyone is responsible for their own. They all made cardboard remotes of their own design, and a poster in the classroom reminds them to keep their remote in their pocket and don't push anybody else's buttons.
Punishing bullying behaviour is not working. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Time to start looking a little deeper.
Please don't take my compassion for aggressive kids to mean that I am unaware of the suffering of victims. Quite the contrary. When I worked at the Regional Support Centre for at-risk kids, our clientele was 90-95% male. At the same time that I worked there, my partner worked at a program helping sexually exploited youth transition out of the sex trade, with 99% of the clientele female.
It was an interesting time at our house. My partner would come home raving about the perpetrators (largely male) who had caused so much agony and destruction in the lives of these girls. Meanwhile, I had spent my day with aggressive males, trying to help them correct patterns of behaviour before they became the men my partner was talking about. But guess what? Many of those boys had been abused in a myriad of hair-raising ways. We saw the cycle played out in front of us every day. And in those environments, using flimsy terms like bully and victim took us nowhere. We needed words like physical and emotional safety, stability, self-respect, trust, and healthy communication.
And since this has turned into a full-on rant, let me end with this: where do kids learn how to behave?
They take what they see around them, and apply it to how they are feeling in the moment. So, if a child lives in a home where one parent dominates the other, what do you expect? If a child lives in a community where the haves manipulate and exploit the have-nots, what do you expect? If a child lives in a city or province where leaders use aggression and intimidation to wrest control from one another, what do you expect?
Calling our kids "bullies" is a pretty dishonourable way of avoiding the screaming inequalites in our society.
Take this post for what it is; an opinion and - despite my title - an invitation to dialogue.
Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."
No comments:
Post a Comment