When I was a child, I was small, shy, prone to uncontrollable crying and giggling, and very smart.
In other words, I was a great target for bulies.
I grew up in the Midwest, and at the time, the going wisdom in the schools seemed to be that “kids will be kids.” Unless a child did something really awful that damaged school property or caused blood to flow, kids were expected to work things out for themselves.
There are many problems with this approach, and I’d never advocate a return to it. But as the parent now of a child who is not always the favorite of kids, teachers, or parents at school, I’ve got a bit of a wider point of view on the subject.
When I think back to the problems I had as a kid, I realize that I learned a lot of life lessons that were not necessarily easy but have served me well. I learned to decide when I want to stick my neck out and when I should let things go. I learned that sometimes there are people in this world you have to back away from rather than confront. And I’ve learned that people do change and grow. I’ve learned that situations that start ugly can be fixed.
I also learned lessons from being the bad kid. I remember doing things to other kids that were truly awful. I don’t remember them because of the punishment. I remember them because of the change in my perspective when I saw the reactions of my victims. Times when I was the bully rather than the bullied taught me a lot.
Sometimes it seems to me that in our modern approach to child-rearing, we might be insulating our children from some of these valuable lessons. Some kids go to private schools that simply get rid of any child who is behaviorally different. In public schools, the parents of behaviorally different kids are pressured to do things that will make the other kids and teachers more comfortable but won’t necessarily benefit the kid with the problem. Someone I know who worked for a long time in a public school said that in the school where she worked, children were just simply not allowed to touch each other! It was just too inconvenient for staff to figure out what was good and bad touching.
I guess I’m pretty practical-minded about people: people do good and bad things and everything in between. There are few people who are truly bad through and through, but there are many people, in fact probably all of us, who do some amount of morally indefensible things. And even the best-behaved among us often spend a lot of time trying to twist those actions into a morally defensible story rather than owning up to them as wrong.
In other words, people are not perfect.
Barack Obama tells the story of when he realized that his beloved grandmother who was taking care of him was racist. He doesn’t tell the story to illustrate what a bad person she was; he tells the story to illustrate how he learned and grew from the experience. Yes, it would have been easier for him if he hadn’t had to confront racism coming from a person he loved most in the world. But if things had been more convenient, would he be the person he is today?
I’m not saying that we should go out and seek difficult experiences for our kids, but that we should take a wider view of the problems our children face. I was talking to a father recently who was frustrated about his son being bullied at school. His son had been counseled not to fight back, because they were working on the problem with the kid doing the bullying. The father said to me, “At this point, I’m about to tell my kid that the next time that kid touches him, he should just whallop him!” Please note that this father is a man who is more in tune with a pacifist version of Buddhism than the “eye for an eye” religion he grew up with. His point wasn’t that it’s always right to fight back, but he did feel that at some point, his son had to defend himself. He wasn’t comfortable with the lesson his son was learning: if something bad is being done to you, sit back and take it without a word because someone else will fix it for you.
Perhaps this is what it really comes down to for me: once you graduate into the real world, people aren’t going to come and fix everything for you. But if you go to a school where you experience a manufactured simpicity in your relations with other kids, how are you going to prepare for that?
The “bad” kids who made me cry are probably all now fine adults, living their lives. I forgive them, and thank them for what they taught me.
