A few months ago, I wrote some articles about bullying. Well, it is time to revisit the subject.
A good friend has been going through a rough time. She is the mother of two children. Her oldest child is her profoundly developmentally disabled adult daughter, her youngest her bright and quiet teenage son. She is the sole caregiver for the daughter, who requires supervision 24/7. Once the girl aged out of the school system, there was no placement in any kind of an adult care program available. She has been told by her state agency there is a 10 year waiting list. She is divorced, stays home with her daughter, and struggles to make ends meet with various sources of income, including financial support from her estranged ex husband and the daughter’s disability checks. She wants to go back to school (after 25 years of being home) and get a good job, but right now there is no viable solution for her daughter’s care. She herself has major health problems.
This is not about the daughter’s or mother’s problems – this is about the son. Oh, yeah, the normal kid. The good student. As the family’s financial, legal, and medical problems have grown more difficult, her son has become very quiet. Too quiet. Making sense of a difficult situation like this is hard for an adult, but for a teen it is much worse. Seems he hasn’t been sharing with her everything that is going on at school – doesn’t want to worry her. So she was quite shocked when he came home doubled over with stomach cramps, and spent most of the afternoon in the bathroom with diarrhea. She was even more shocked to get a call from the assistant principal informing her that one of the boy’s classmates had slipped a laxative into his drink at lunchtime. Seems they thought it would be a funny joke. These kids are 15. The AP told her that the kid who tampered with the drink would have to eat lunch in the principal’s office for a few weeks.
Her son said he thought this was a pretty good prank and that he was not mad at the kid. Then the next day he asked her if he could be home schooled. She is really not up to that, because of the full time care the daughter needs. She feels he needs to be in a school environment and not hide at home. But it should be a safe school environment – a place where you can put your drink on the table in the cafeteria and not worry about what someone might have added to it when you aren’t looking.
My friend thinks that more needs to be done than just “quarantine” the bully. She understands that kids may not realize the serious physical harm that a prank like that could do, especially to someone with heart or kidney problems, allergies, or drug interactions. She believes the school should be proactive and educate students about how stupid pranks like this can really damage someone’s health – and make pranks like this “unfunny” and not so cool. She reasons that if more students understood the effect of something like this, maybe they would recognize the bullies for what they really are – not cool, but stupid and cruel.
Before setting her appointment with the principal, she decided to get a reality check with other moms, just to see if she was “overreacting”. The other mothers in the neighborhood were equally outraged, frightened for their own teens, and agreed to back her up. She learned another disturbing fact – some of the students who encouraged this prank recently participated in a local church overnight youth retreat. Many kids were afraid to fall asleep on this retreat, because the bullying crew attacked the sleeping students, drawing obscene pictures on their faces with indelible markers, spraying them with glue and flour, gluing their eyes shut, etc. When she asked where the adult advisors had been, the answer was “Asleep”. It took several days for the truth to come out, because the kids were afraid of being “snitches” and losing the approval of their peers.
Bullying is not just a school problem, and not just a family problem. Anyone who works with young people has a responsibility to prevent occasions for kids to intimidate other kids, and to provide appropriate supervision. Many of our children come from homes where there is severe stress and dysfunction, and they crave the safety of a church group or a classroom, or a community center. When school, church, community, and recreation gatherings become lawless and unsafe, vulnerable teens truly feel as though there is no place where they can truly be free to be themselves – so they hide, and become depressed, anxious, and fail to thrive by being at their best.
I previously wrote about how our children need to know they have a champion, a parent who will stand with them empower them through advocacy, backup, support. This boy has many terrible things to endure in his life right now, none of which are his fault. But he is lucky in one respect: his mom is one of the strongest people I know. I hope that he can draw from her strength, and carry it forward into manhood.