Started a small discussion at Facebook when I asked for thoughts on an evening program at my older daughter's school. In a couple weeks, they will be featuring an author of two books, writing on how she "survived" bullying. The new "thing", well, over the past few years, has been focusing on bullying as a serious problem in schools to be dealt with far more vigorously and self-consciously on a policy level than heretofore.
I just cannot get behind it.
First, an adult who writes not one but two books on "surviving" bullying has issues that go far beyond the result of schoolyard pranks. Seriously.
Second, in general, the larger social discussion over "bullying" muddles real distinctions among different phenomena, roughly distinguished with the labels "teasing,", "bullying", and "harassment". While they are all related to a larger, mostly unconscious, creation of a social hierarchy that even kids do to set the boundaries in the milieu of their own, somewhat separate, society, they are very different things. Yet all get tagged under the rubric "bullying", which is actually a fairly narrow phenomenon, and can be dealt with easily enough by parents, teachers, and school administrators.
Finally, I just don't think we are doing right by our children when we not only offer the chilling prospect of life-long psychological damage done by "bullying", but offer the services of state functionaries (teachers and school administrators) as intermediaries in the social world of children. While I am all for even children's social life to be more open and accommodating to difference, the reality is that it is little different from any other society. It takes time - which includes getting older - for the society of the school yard to learn to be open. Legal intervention to force an openness it might not be ready for will not create openness, but rather resentment.
This is not to say that there aren't instances where such intervention isn't warranted. On the contrary, the harassment of girls by boys and sexual and racial minorities are instances when such intervention - up to and including involving law enforcement - are necessary. That, however, isn't bullying, unless you are willing to extend that word's definition beyond recognition.
When my older daughter was in third grade, she came home sad one day. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that some kids were teasing her because she was shorter and thinner than everyone (she will be grateful for the whole thin thing in just a year or two . . .) and I told her that, the next time some dork called her "shrimp" to just say, "Well, I may be short but you're ugly and I'll grow". This adaptation of a Churchillian bon mot was not well-received, but the principle I was trying to instill, I think, is good. First, such teasing is really not worth getting one's panties in a wad. Second, it is important to push back a little. While teasing is usually done seeking some kind of response, ignoring it doesn't necessarily work; pushing back, however, is a pretty clear signal that it isn't going to be tolerated, and the particular target isn't necessarily a good one.
Giving our children the tools to function in society includes giving them a little bit of a backbone in the face of social conflict outside the boundaries of clearly defined guidelines of legally-accepted understandings of right and wrong. That, too, is a part of parenting. It isn't always easy for a parent to hear that his or her child is either the victim or perpetrator of bullying; on the other hand, giving our kids tools to deal with success with these situations is far better than turning to our schools and screaming at them to police in fine detail all the going's-on during recess.
