When my son was in first grade, his teacher brought up a serious problem at our first parent-teacher meeting. “We need to work on his tattling,” she said. “It’s a really serious problem.”
I was confused. I’d always been happy that my firstborn was well-behaved at school. Although he was often very difficult at home, his teachers had never complained. There were always other kids to complain about! And he’d had no problem in his tiny kindergarten class.
I worked in his first grade classroom once a week, so I knew the kids in his class. There were plenty of behavioral issues from those kids, so why was she so focused on the fact that my son was often the first to tell the teacher when a kid did something wrong?
Then I had my daughter. I think the first child is the one who teaches you how to parent that child, and the second one is the one who teaches you how to parent. My daughter’s problems at school were completely different, and much more severe. It seemed that she was always attracted to the things that kids aren’t supposed to do. The teachers said her name a lot. The kids started to notice.
She had big trouble in her kindergarten class, so I started attending with her. And one of the first things I noticed was the tattling. No matter what my daughter did, some child would call out to the teacher to report it. Many of the small things she did were “normal” and not worth calling attention to, but because the teacher was so focused on her negative behaviors, she “rewarded” the tattlers by reacting immediately and focusing on every detail of my daughter’s behavior.
It became a self-supporting cycle: my daughter felt that she was being watched all the time and that anything she did would be tattled about. So instead of trying to behave better, she reacted to the negative attention and things got worse. The teacher didn’t stop the tattling, and in fact seemed to welcome fourteen extra pairs of eyes to watch over her most difficult student. So things ramped up and up and up…
I now completely understand about the tattling thing. Teachers who allow it let a quiet poison creep into their relationship with the children. Some children are simply more apt to get into trouble at school. They’re the kids who don’t just happen to have the right set of attributes that school rewards. A teacher who lets those kids start to feel like there is something fundamentally wrong with them will lose those kids. And the tattlers, though they think they’re doing the right thing, will find that other kids start to dislike them. I’m reminded of one of Russell Hoban’s Frances books, where Frances has a friend who keeps tricking her. Finally Frances says, “I don’t want to be careful… I want to be friends.” (Loose quotation from my memory only!)
Kids start to pull away from the tattlers. They’re afraid, even if they aren’t the kids who have been tattled on, that they will be next. The tattlers think they’re doing the right thing, and they get confused that they get approval from one end and rejection from the other.
The thing I haven’t quite mastered is how to define tattling when a tattler does it. On the one hand, I do want to know if my daughter is in danger, has done something that I need to know about, or has put another child in danger. But if a kid tells me about every little nuance of her behavior, I have to tell him, “I’m sorry to hear that. Go tell her it’s a problem, not me.”
My sister’s son is much like my son. Well-behaved in school, seldom the aggressor in any situation, he feels uncomfortable with “bad” behavior and comes to me often when he is with my daughter. Most of what he tells me is something he’s going to have to learn to deal with on his own. One day he said, “She’s chasing me.” I told him, “she can only chase you if you run. Please go tell her that you don’t like it.” Although sometimes he tells me things that I’m glad to learn, I can’t reward him for the behavior.
My daughter, whose tattling sensor is rather keen at six years old, has noticed that he does this, and it’s clear that it hurts her feelings. She has become more difficult with him, not less. All the ways that she acts that bother him are starting to get more pronounced around him. Again the self-supporting cycle.
I’m trying to figure out how to help my daughter understand better why kids tattle on her behavior, and to respond to the tattlers in a positive way that doesn’t make them feel bad for their own personality traits. Like much of parenting, it’s a high wire act. Tune in tomorrow to find out whether there was a net under me when I fell…!
