Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Is it Bullying?




I take bullying very seriously. I know from my own childhood and my teaching practice that bullying can have significant and powerful long-term effects on children. I have never written about my own experiences as an overweight, introverted child in Middleton, Wisconsin.  I have never talked about the fear I had going into an empty, dead-end hallway in my middle school alone, afraid that someone would taunt me and I couldn't easily get away. I never told anyone about the boys that would throw rocks at me as I walked home from school - trying to walk quickly, nonchalantly even, while dodging pebbles flying past my head. I never told anyone about how I never tried out for chorus or cheerleading....or anything really -  because I feared the taunts outside of teachers' ear shots. "You think you are good enough to sing, fatty?", "You think they would let a fatso like you in short skirt in front of the school?"

Those voices are a part of me now. I worry about them ever going away, but they have gotten a little softer over the years. (Not enough for me to go to a class reunion though.) I think about those voices, those kids more often than I would like to admit - even as they are 1,500 miles away and old, much better behaved, 40 year-olds. But I don't really talk to people about it.

The other day, however, I got a phone call. It was a father, very upset, about his son's school.* He said that they were looking for a new school immediately and needed some help. He told me that his son was being bullied and the school was doing nothing about it. I leapt in to solve the problem. 
"That is horrible. I am so sorry," I said. "Please tell me what is going on."
"Well - he has been bitten three times by the same child - and....", he continues his story. The story is full of concern for his son, stern conversations with the teacher and the director, a general dislike of the program, and wanting to find another place immediately. 
I paused. "You know," I said. "We just jumped into this story and I realized, I don't know how old your son is." 
"He is three - just turned three."
"And his class - how old are the children in his class?"
"It is a group of three and four year olds."
"And the child that bit Ryan?"
"The bully is three, just like Ryan."

Oh. 

At StopBullying.org, they define bullying as an act that includes aggression (physical, verbal, or emotional) and contains: 
  • An Imbalance of Power: Kids who bully use their power—such as physical strength, access to embarrassing information, or popularity—to control or harm others. Power imbalances can change over time and in different situations, even if they involve the same people.
  • Repetition: Bullying behaviors happen more than once or have the potential to happen more than once.
When children learn to walk or run, we give them room to fall down and absolute encouragement to get back up again. When children are learning their ABCs, we show them over and over again the letters of their name, and correct them gently when they don't learn it right away. When a three year old is struggling to develop a skill, like writing "MAMA" in all caps - and they turn their "a" on its side - we don't call them "learning disabled", or "stupid".

OK - so Ryan was bit three times. That technically is a repetition of physical aggression. And Ryan, after being bitten three times, was very worried about going to school and being bitten again - which by some, could be interpreted as an imbalance of power. But does that make the little boy in this story a bully - at age three? Does this experience make Ryan a victim? 

I don't think so - for two reasons. 

(1) Our society, for a while, has been diligently working on pushing higher-order, developmental expectations into the realm of preschool and elementary school. One of the many difficulties with that model is that children need time to develop skills. All kind of skills. Academic, cognitive, physical, emotional - and social. Along with time - which seems hard enough for parents, teachers, and policymakers to give -  they need one other thing to become the people we want them to be. The space to fail.

I would posit that those same children need to be allowed the same room to fail at being a member of our social world. At being a friend, a classmate. They need to be given the space to hit, bite, tease, exclude, steal, chase, and taunt. They are allowed to misread cues from their friend; be unsympathetic - or even callous towards the needs of another; or be impulsive - over-excited in their play and unsure what to do with their body to stay in the game. They need to know what those experiences feel like - as a perpetrator and as a recipient -as a "bully" and as a "victim". 

Those valuable experiences allow children to know what it feels like to see a person cry from what you have done; to know the disappointment of not getting a turn; to feel embarrassment, shame, shock, sadness, isolation, anger, fear and yes, pain. When they know these feelings first hand AND are supported by the grown ups around them to express them and work on skills for doing better the next time -  then, and only then, will we be on our way to creating emotionally literate young adults who don't corner overweight, introverted girls in dead end hallways. Allowing young children to fail, while supporting them in developing the skills they need to assert themselves effectively when they are on the other end of a transgression, also would have been handy for the girl getting rocks thrown at her on her walk home. There are lessons to learn for everyone - and they are so important for creating the safe middle schools and high schools that our young adults deserve. 

And if we don't want these lessons to be learned in middle school and high school - where the stakes can be much, much higher and the adults may have less control, insight, and say - we have to let children learn them in preschool and elementary school. Not unchecked. Not without coaching and consequences. Not without structure and communication. But we have to let them fail somewhere.


(2) In the field of special education, you can't legally label a child with a disability if there is something environmental that could have caused the difficulty. So for instance, if the child hasn't been in school for two years, we can't say the child has a learning disability because we haven't tried to teach them yet. Makes sense - there is not something "wrong" with the child until we have tried to help in a variety of ways and we have found that typical interventions aren't working. 

Following this line of thought, I suggest the "bully" - or "victim" label -  isn't allowed to be trotted out until we have done significant work to try to help the children involved learn the social skills they need to be positive, proactive and safe members of a group. Significant means all the adults in those children's lives are working for both sides of the team. Adults who are rooting for the three year-old to stop biting and for Ryan to learn to move away from people who make him feel uncomfortable or to use his words when he is hurt. Teachers who work in schools that are well-staffed to support close supervision and are given in-depth training to respond effectively when children fail in their social skills. Parents who support the teachers in seeing the needs of the children - their own, and other people's - in failed social attempts, and don't just focus on what it takes for it never to happen again. Significant means we keep trying to teach the skills that these children need to learn - every day, in every classroom, in every home. We don't just work on this for a month or two, but we work on this throughout early childhood while giving kids the developmental time to grow and strengthen their skills.

Clayton R. Cook and co-authors from the University of California at Riverside examined 153 studies from the last 30 years looking at bullies and victims in schools. They consistently found that both bullies and victims both have poor social problem-solving skills. Let's take some of the effort we are pouring into children putting a red X in the yellow triangle and parroting the 26 letters of the alphabet - and teach them how to positively navigate the social world, using the failed attempts that surround us each day as teachers and parents of young children as opportunities.

When the children involved are young (not just the three year olds, but onward at least until age 9) and they haven't had significant support in developing positive social skills, I don't think we can throw down the "bully" card or shoulder someone with a "victim" label. We can be concerned. We can talk to teachers about next steps. We can make sure that our child is in a setting where children are consistently scaffolded into learning social skills. We can use these lessons to teach our own children about how to be a friend in our home. But we can't saddle them. Please. Not just yet.

*Identifying details have been changed to maintain confidentiality. Only the general scenario and the ages of the children in this story are real. 



No comments:

Post a Comment