Keeping a Clear Head About Bullying
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
I know I don’t usually link to generic parenting advice in this space. That’s because I find most parenting advice either stupendously obvious or mildly annoying or both. (Not advice from my mom, of course, which is usually helpful, if somewhat tinged with the satisfaction of someone who is enjoying the karmic retribution that all parents long for their children to experience.) To be honest, my favorite kind of parenting advice is the kind that tells parents to calm down and trust their own instincts and knowledge of their children. I don’t think we get that enough nowadays.
As an example, I offer this article on bullying from MSN–partly because of its advice on how to teach your older child to handle aggression, but mostly for its sensible attitude to the parent’s fear that you might be raising a bully. Sometimes I think that we’re somehow losing all knowledge of what can be expected from young children in terms of behavior. It’s as though we’ve taken the Rousseauian romanticism of children’s nature to ridiculous extremes–whether it be in those who are reluctant to place any curbs whatsoever on their children’s behavior or from those who pathologize any behavior that falls outside of their vision of naturally obedient children as being an obvious sign of some kind of disorder requiring medical intervention. To be honest, while the former group can be a bit annoying, the latter is the more harmful because it is this group that calls for the doctors and the prescriptions the moment a little boy starts acting in a way that they decide is abnormal–in short, when he starts acting like a little boy.
What I liked about the MSN article is that it tries to cut through the hysteria that can erupt from any sign of (totally normal and natural) aggressive behavior from a preschool or toddler-aged child. No, I’m not claiming that these kind of things don’t need to be corrected, but that’s what parents are for. However, just because little Jake got upset and lashed out over the color of his pudding cup doesn’t mean that you’re raising a bully or need an intervention.
This is what people mean when they point out that we may have a child-centered culture, but we definitely don’t have a parent-centered one. A parent-centered culture would be more supportive and less judgmental of what parents go through. When, “It’s really the parents’ fault . . . ” is such a popular way to start a sentence, who could wonder that parents get a little paranoid?
