"The tree long remembers what the axe soon forgets..." What are you teaching your kids?

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that talked about global warming.  Essentially it said “what if we fixed global warming; made the Earth healthier, saved endangered species and cleaned up our atmosphere and it was all a big mistake?”  The sticker ultimately was taking a jab at the consequence of fixing the causes of global warming and then it turned out that global warming wasn’t even really as bad a problem as we thought it once was.

So that, in turn, got me thinking about bullying.  What if we committed ourselves and our schools to raising better kids; creating learning communities that were more supportive, more accepting, and less harsh or cruel – and in the end the bullying problem wasn’t as bad as we feared it once was?

Any of us with kids who aren’t bullies feel like bullying is a danger to the physical and emotional well being of our kids.  Just google the names: Seth Welsh, Phoebe Prince, Bobby Tillman, or any of thousands of others and you will take a small measure of the problem.  Google the phrase “Bullied to Death” and among the 320,000 hits on that phrase you will find in heartbreaking detail descriptions of bullying’s worst case scenarios.

Yet, the problem still exists.  You’d like to point at teachers and ask “what are you doing?  Why can’t you stop this?  How are you protecting my kids?”  But the truth is, it begins with the parents.  The parents of one notorious bully in my parents' old neighborhood said many times “we don’t get involved in these kinds of things; we let the kids work things out for themselves…”  It strikes me as a parent now myself that that kind of thinking is all well and good if your kid is the bully.  But what if your kid is the victim of the bully?  Some surprising and sobering facts on bullies can be found in the 2009 Indicators of School Crime and Safety – a survey which collected statistics from a variety of studies and showed that:

• One third of teens reported being bullied while at school
• About 20 percent of teens had been made fun of by a bully, 18 percent of teens had rumors or gossip spread about them, 11 percent were physically bullied, such as being shoved, tripped, or spit on, 6 percent were threatened, 5 percent were excluded from activities they wanted to participate in, 4 percent were coerced into something they did not want to do, and 4 percent had their personal belongings destroyed by bullies
• 4 percent of teens in this study reported being the victims of cyber bullying
• Most bullying occurred inside the school, with smaller numbers of bullying incidents occurring outside on the school grounds, on the school bus, or on the way to school
• Only about a third of bully victims reported the bullying to someone at school
• About 2 of every 3 bully victims were bullied once or twice during the school year, 1 in 5 were bullied once or twice a month, and about 1 in 10 were bullied daily or several times a week
• In this study, females and white students reported the most incidents of being the victims of bullying
• 44 percent of middle schools reported bullying problems, compared to just over 20 percent of both elementary and high schools

Similarly, the 2009 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that about 1 in 5 teens had been bullied at school in the last year. The Federal government's Find Youth Info web site also reports some recent bullying statistics:

• Bullying is most common among middle school children, where almost half of students may be bully victims
• Between 15 and 25 percent of students overall are frequent victims of bullying, and 15 to 20 percent of students bully others often
• About 20 percent of students experience physical bullying at some point in their lives, while almost a third experience some type of bullying
• About 8 percent of students have been the victims of a cyber bully
• Studies have indicated that females may be the victims of bullying more often than males; males are more likely to experience physical or verbal bullying, while females are more likely to experience social or psychological bullying
• Students with disabilities are more likely to be the victims of bullying
• Homosexual and bisexual teens are more likely to report bullying than heterosexual teens

Experts agree that there is a relationship between bullying or being bullied and other types of violence, including fighting, carrying weapons, and suicide.  So why, with that kind of data so readily at hand, do we tolerate bullying?

For parents, it might boil down to toughness, competition, social Darwinsim.  You won’t get ahead in life if you let other people roll right over you, right?  Well that’s what we always thought – and what good did it do us?  Has tolerating that mindset eradicated bullying?  Has peace broken out world wide and no one told me? Was the Civil Rights movement waged by bullies or by peaceful action?

For kids it might be as uncomplicated as “snitches get stitches.”  No one wants to be a tattletale.  We hold tattletales in greater contempt than we do the bullies it seems.  But it’s not that simple, is it?  Are we really expecting a decent country if we teach our kids to readily divorce themselves from the greater good?  We can’t really mean that.

For teachers, it might be the 30 – 40 kids they have in their classrooms and the requirements of all that goes into educating our kids that keep them from solving the problem.  It could be also the state of education in general – I am certain there are teachers in almost every state in the union who wish for more resources and smaller classes. For the teacher contemplating acting toward a bully they must invariably think “well, whose brother, the lawyer, is going to sue me tomorrow if I accuse their child of being the school bully?”  While it may be true that we live in a litigious society and that teachers don’t have enough time or resources, I respond to that truth by saying “So what?”  It’s called leadership. Failure to exercise it is a betrayal of the sacred trust we put in our teachers. 

I don’t know the answer – except to say that we have to force these issues out at least into a open dialogue.  Parents, force your schools to confront it.  Principals, force your teachers to report it, and teachers and staff members be vigilant in creating educational communities that support trust, acceptance, support. What if, in so doing, we cured bullying and it turned out it wasn’t really that big of a problem after all?  What would the benefit be – of having more decent kids; more supportive academic environments, less hate, more tolerance, less division, more acceptance?  What if we started out to change just one little corner of the world and ended up making a real and lasting difference? What else might we cure in the process?

My children are my heroes – they are so good; so decent, so kind.  It pains me to see them, in their decency, to be made the victim by kids whose parents have raised them not to care, to be cruel for sport; to be deliberately unkind.  When we teach effective communication strategies, one of the things I always include is the idea that “the tree long remembers what the axe soon forgets.”  Are you teaching your kids to be axes or trees?  I am a big fan of the gorgeous trees, myself.

So thanks for stopping by my blog today.  Wherever you are, I hope you are well and that you and yours are surrounded by those who love you, who will stand with you unshaken and immoveable by the bully’s unkind agenda. I hope you find yourself in the company of ordinary heroes who will not permit any bully to win the day or take the high ground at the expense of any child’s innocence and joy. Thanks for taking the time to read this note.  It is perhaps my message in a bottle to the world written out of love for my kids.  An artifact of my silent hope for them, and your kids as well, to grow up in a world more gentle, more fun, and less harsh.

Dennis

Smalltowndad@hotmail.com