Bully List: Right or Wrong?

Apr 192010
 
Checklist

Checklist (Photo credit: o.tacke)

 

In an effort to be more proactive about bullying prevention, a Spencer, Massachusetts school gave students the opportunity to -anonymously – submit a list of bullies to some of their teachers.

Apparently the the five kids whose names showed up at the top of most of the lists were separated from the other kids for a period of time and carefully monitored in the halls, the cafeteria and in the bus lines. For a while.

I have seen a number of news reports about this. One features a Mom whose son was on the list. In that video, both she and her son admit that he has been a bully. Her son said that although he didn’t like the school’s intervention, it was effective. He doesn’t like the fact that other kids have been saying that, because he’s on that list, they don’t want to be friends.

The focus of that report, however, was on the Mom’s anger at the school — although I haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly what she’s angry about. It seems to be for spotlighting the top five kids on the list and monitoring their behavior. The superintendent, while supporting the teachers’ intent, apparently has stopped ‘the list’ and the intervention.

But here’s something that only showed up in one of the reports: the young man in the report had been bullied at school for a long time prior to adopting the aggressive himself.

I’m confused. What do you think of what the teachers did? Is it discipline or is it abuse? The mom? Embarrassed, enabling or protective? The superintendent? Seeking fairness or avoiding headlines? Does responsible parenting mean asking ourselves whether or not OUR precious children could be perpetrating such behavior?

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Fair Play for Coach Playfair?

Mar 312010
 
Hockey Cat

Hockey Cat (Photo credit: foodiesathome.com)

 

“How would you like to be followed by a video camera, with vivid color and complete sound recording capability, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day for eighteen years?”

That question came from a desire for a strong metaphor to help parents appreciate the power of their own example.  And now there’s YouTube.  Frankly, it is not what I had in mind.

I just spent over an hour googling AHL hockey coach Jim Playfair – mostly because I was curious to know who he was before his now-famous stick-breaking, mad dog crazy, foaming at the mouth tantrum on the job.  Televised.  And by now re-played more than a million times.  (OK, go ahead.)

Why did I spend an hour?  Mostly because I was sure that, with more than forty pages of results containing almost one million mentions, I would find something other than a link to that YouTube video.

I found a single page with his stats, and another two or three mentions of the fact that he was an Olympic torchbearer.  And it took the better part of an hour.

On the other hand, my search for Patrice Bergeron yielded one page linking to articles about his visits to injured high school hockey player Matt Brown… followed by several pages of other types of information.

Role models are important and everyone makes mistakes.  Do ‘bad acts’ render us one-dimensional?  Do they ‘weigh’ more than kindness and good grace?  Or, are we so addicted to the extreme, bizarre behavior that dominates the media that we have we started to think that this type of behavior ‘normal’?

Maybe some of you will take this opportunity to have family discussions about privacy and internet safety and reputation and doing the right thing, even when nobody’s watching. Others might talk about leadership and role modeling and sportsmanship, while others may talk about media biases.  There’s a lot to learn here!

By the way, for those of you keeping score at home, buried fairly far down in most of those articles, was an apology from Playfair to parents involved in youth sports — especially youth hockey.

But you’d have to get past the video to see it.

Teaching Risk Management: Child’s Play?

Mar 022010
 
Playground

Playground (Photo credit: phalinn)

 

What is a sane and healthy level of risk when raising children?  How do we teach our kids to assess and manage risk without scaring the daylights out of either us or them in the process?  Where’s the balance?  Let’s go to the playground.

Think about the first time you took your little one to the playground and tried out a seesaw.  The little one had absolutely no about this piece of equipment, what it could do or what was about to come.  Picture what you (most likely) did next.

Parents often lift that small child and place her carefully on the high end of the apparatus.  We hold her there, mid-air, for a few seconds while she feels the thrill (and maybe a little bit of fear) that goes with being two feet tall and ‘flying’ five feet in the air.  She’s able to manage it because you’re standing there — between her and the ground.

Then, we stop.  She has had her introduction.  It was fun.  We quit while we’re ahead.  Enough for one day.

Fast forward to a time when that same child, now maybe six or seven years old, rides that seesaw like a surfboard, running from one end to the other and delighting in the loud CRASH that happens some time after she crosses the center of the board.

What has changed?

Her balance and coordination are better than when she was a toddler.    She has had more experiences experimenting with balance and gravity.  (It has been a long time since gravity outwitted her while trying to cross the living room floor!)

Part of knowing our kids means being aware of their abilities, strengths and fears.  As a proactive parent, I recognize that life is full of risks and that it is in the best interesest of my family to choose how and when to teach about it –at least as often as I can.

We teach risk management to our kids like we teach anything else — in small doses and matched to their age, skill-level and interests.  We send them to the end of a supermarket aisle to choose an item for the family shopping cart long before we sent them to the store.  What was ‘risk’ for a toddler is ‘baby stuff’ for a third grader.

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