velvetpage (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
velvetpage) wrote2006-03-11 09:06 am
velvetpage) wrote2006-03-11 09:06 am
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PoAC: Life lessons for my kids
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ontario_teacher and perfect_parent
The newspaper this week has been full of a heinous crime. A young woman in a small town near here was gang-raped while passed out drunk at a friend's nineteenth birthday party. Her whole school knew about it before she did - she knew something had happened, but not what. Yesterday, the boy whose birthday it was, was sentenced to two years less a day. That leaves him in provincial prison instead of federal, probably a good thing for a first offence. He won't go on the sex offender registry, but he will be required to submit a DNA sample to be stored and compared in any future rape cases.
Meanwhile, the young man's mother was downstairs in the same house. She had supplied the party - consisting almost entirely of underage boys - with jello shooters, her son's private beer fridge was well-stocked, and she didn't check on the party even once - not even when one bystander got up and left, leaving a hint that she should go check on her son. He was the only one to leave out of ten observers and three perpetrators.
Yesterday, I had to deal with an element of bullying that always makes me sick to my stomach. Two girls - two of my best girls, and another great girl from the other grade four class - came to me and told me that two boys were saying nasty things about them. There were rumours about the girls sleeping together, and notes had been passed that were supposed to be from the girls and were actually from the boys. The whole class - at least the boys - was snickering about it. The ringleaders? Two of my best boys, good students, smart kids, and friends of the girls in question. If I'd been asked to guess who would be involved in this sort of thing, the girls would have been on my list as potential victims (nice, innocent girls seem to come in for more sexual bullying than more worldly girls, often) but the boys would have been near the bottom of my list of potential perpetrators.
I told the principal, who suggested that, since at this point it was the girls' word against the boys, I should talk to them and tell them that, so long as it stopped completely, they would not be in trouble. I did that. I told them that I knew them and liked them, and was disappointed in their behaviour; that I knew sometimes really good kids could do some really mean, stupid things, and that I thought that had happened here; and that if this had happened when they had passed their twelfth birthdays, it could result in a criminal charge of sexual harrassment. (That was actually laying it on rather thick, but I would rather it be too thick than too thin - I wanted to put the fear of God into them.) I told them that I was pretty sure the girls involved were their friends, and that all the girls wanted was for it to stop. The bottom line: if it stopped and never started again, we'd forget it ever happened. But if it ever happened again, the girls had instructions to go straight to the principal and the consequences would be severe, would involve the principal, their parents and possibly the police (again, laying it on with a trowel) and that it would be treated as the second time, not the first. I used the words "verbal bullying" in every other sentence, and the term "sexual harrassment" only once. By the time I was done, the boys went back to their desks, put their heads down on them, and cried for most of the rest of the afternoon. I told their friends to let them have some privacy, and I refused to answer any questions about it. "If you needed to know, you already would. This is between me and them and no one else."
I'm almost glad it happened, and here's why.
I believe what I said to those boys. They're good kids who did something really dumb, as good kids do sometimes. But doing that dumb thing now, when they're young enough and supervised enough that it can be nipped in the bud with just a few hurt feelings, is preferable to them doing a similar dumb thing, or something worse along the same continuum, when they're seventeen and drunk at a house party. Maybe, just maybe, they'll be mature enough to get past their embarrassment and apologize to the girls; I didn't make them do that, and I told the girls not to expect it, but I suggested it would be the right thing to do. If they do, I'm certain this will be the last time they harrass a girl. They'll see these girls and their sexuality, not as something to be joked about, but as a powerful and important element of femaleness and something to be respected. They'll forge a stronger friendship with the girls, hopefully - at least two of the girls are mature enough to give them a second chance, and the harrassment hadn't gotten to the point where everyone was deeply hurt by it - and strong, respectful friendships between girls and boys are a strong preventative factor in sexual harrassment. Maybe, just maybe, that talk will prevent them from doing something life-alteringly stupid and cruel when they're celebrating a birthday at someone's house in eight or nine or ten years' time.
If I ever have a son, I'm going to make sure he respects women and girls as people, not as objects. But right now, I have two daughters. How do we protect them? How do we teach them to trust that their world will be safe, and still prepare them for the possibility that it won't be? How do we teach them to believe and expect the best in people, and still make them understand that there are situations where the best is not what will likely happen?
I don't want to make my daughters afraid to live life. I don't want them to view everyone they meet with suspicion. I want them to believe that most people are decent folks who will behave decently in most situations. And yet that level of trust can be dangerous. It's a combination of luck, good parenting, and strong will on my part that I never found myself in a situation like that. Luck, because I never fell in with friends who drank a lot - at least, not until university, and even then they were responsible about it, ensuring that a few people remained sober at every party in case things got out of hand. Good parenting, because my parents made sure they knew where I was and taught me the dangers of alcohol and excess. Strong will, or possibly strong inhibitions, because I was not a follower. If I had found myself in a position where I was afraid for my safety, I would have left. What if one of those elements is missing from my daughters' lives?
I have little control over luck, but I hopefully will be able to influence it, helping them choose friends and nurture friendships with good kids, and getting to know those kids' parents. But the rapist in the newspaper is widely regarded in his home town as a good kid who went horribly wrong on that night. And the teen scene in Hamilton is scary. Drugs, alcohol, pornography - these are standard elements of underage parties, at ages when kids aren't ready to deal with them, and it's normal for parties to have too little parental supervision.
I have a great deal of control over good parenting. My kids will see me using alcohol responsibly, on an occasional basis. They won't grow up afraid of it, but with a healthy respect for it. I will teach them that there's no harm in small amounts of alcohol, once they're of age or while they're supervised by adults we trust, but that doing anything to excess is a bad idea, as is standing by while others do things to excess. I will teach them to recognize when a situation is getting out of hand, and the order of operations of things to do about it. I will teach them that I would rather they call home and have me come get them from a bad situation, than stay out of fear of what I'll say, and possibly see the situation get worse. Hopefully, my girls will mostly stay out of such bad situations, and when they do get into them, they'll have the good sense to get themselves out before it gets worse. The key, always, is communication and respect for authority. They have to believe that a) I know what I'm talking about; b) I have their best interests at heart; c) the limits I place are reasonable and need to be respected; and d) if they make a mistake, they will earn points with me if they take steps to correct it or get me to correct it - that helping oneself is always a good decision.
Strong will is partly personality, but it's also partly about having confidence in one's own opinions, instincts and decisions. As such, strong will is partially a development of good parenting. It's also a function of peer relationships. If my girls are leaders in their social groups, they'll reduce the chances of getting caught up in something nasty. If they have enough moral certitude to say no when their friends are doing things that make them uncomfortable, they will probably be fine. Developing that kind of will is the work of a lifetime, and it has already begun. Elizabeth is basically a confident kid, insofar as a child in an egocentric developmental stage can be called confident. By the time she's six, most of the groundwork for a self-confident adult will have been laid.
Sometimes it's scary having a decent grasp of child psychology/developmental timelines. Six years isn't very long. Gradually releasing them into a world that contains this kind of evil is one of the hardest things I'll ever have to do.
ontario_teacher and perfect_parentThe newspaper this week has been full of a heinous crime. A young woman in a small town near here was gang-raped while passed out drunk at a friend's nineteenth birthday party. Her whole school knew about it before she did - she knew something had happened, but not what. Yesterday, the boy whose birthday it was, was sentenced to two years less a day. That leaves him in provincial prison instead of federal, probably a good thing for a first offence. He won't go on the sex offender registry, but he will be required to submit a DNA sample to be stored and compared in any future rape cases.
Meanwhile, the young man's mother was downstairs in the same house. She had supplied the party - consisting almost entirely of underage boys - with jello shooters, her son's private beer fridge was well-stocked, and she didn't check on the party even once - not even when one bystander got up and left, leaving a hint that she should go check on her son. He was the only one to leave out of ten observers and three perpetrators.
Yesterday, I had to deal with an element of bullying that always makes me sick to my stomach. Two girls - two of my best girls, and another great girl from the other grade four class - came to me and told me that two boys were saying nasty things about them. There were rumours about the girls sleeping together, and notes had been passed that were supposed to be from the girls and were actually from the boys. The whole class - at least the boys - was snickering about it. The ringleaders? Two of my best boys, good students, smart kids, and friends of the girls in question. If I'd been asked to guess who would be involved in this sort of thing, the girls would have been on my list as potential victims (nice, innocent girls seem to come in for more sexual bullying than more worldly girls, often) but the boys would have been near the bottom of my list of potential perpetrators.
I told the principal, who suggested that, since at this point it was the girls' word against the boys, I should talk to them and tell them that, so long as it stopped completely, they would not be in trouble. I did that. I told them that I knew them and liked them, and was disappointed in their behaviour; that I knew sometimes really good kids could do some really mean, stupid things, and that I thought that had happened here; and that if this had happened when they had passed their twelfth birthdays, it could result in a criminal charge of sexual harrassment. (That was actually laying it on rather thick, but I would rather it be too thick than too thin - I wanted to put the fear of God into them.) I told them that I was pretty sure the girls involved were their friends, and that all the girls wanted was for it to stop. The bottom line: if it stopped and never started again, we'd forget it ever happened. But if it ever happened again, the girls had instructions to go straight to the principal and the consequences would be severe, would involve the principal, their parents and possibly the police (again, laying it on with a trowel) and that it would be treated as the second time, not the first. I used the words "verbal bullying" in every other sentence, and the term "sexual harrassment" only once. By the time I was done, the boys went back to their desks, put their heads down on them, and cried for most of the rest of the afternoon. I told their friends to let them have some privacy, and I refused to answer any questions about it. "If you needed to know, you already would. This is between me and them and no one else."
I'm almost glad it happened, and here's why.
I believe what I said to those boys. They're good kids who did something really dumb, as good kids do sometimes. But doing that dumb thing now, when they're young enough and supervised enough that it can be nipped in the bud with just a few hurt feelings, is preferable to them doing a similar dumb thing, or something worse along the same continuum, when they're seventeen and drunk at a house party. Maybe, just maybe, they'll be mature enough to get past their embarrassment and apologize to the girls; I didn't make them do that, and I told the girls not to expect it, but I suggested it would be the right thing to do. If they do, I'm certain this will be the last time they harrass a girl. They'll see these girls and their sexuality, not as something to be joked about, but as a powerful and important element of femaleness and something to be respected. They'll forge a stronger friendship with the girls, hopefully - at least two of the girls are mature enough to give them a second chance, and the harrassment hadn't gotten to the point where everyone was deeply hurt by it - and strong, respectful friendships between girls and boys are a strong preventative factor in sexual harrassment. Maybe, just maybe, that talk will prevent them from doing something life-alteringly stupid and cruel when they're celebrating a birthday at someone's house in eight or nine or ten years' time.
If I ever have a son, I'm going to make sure he respects women and girls as people, not as objects. But right now, I have two daughters. How do we protect them? How do we teach them to trust that their world will be safe, and still prepare them for the possibility that it won't be? How do we teach them to believe and expect the best in people, and still make them understand that there are situations where the best is not what will likely happen?
I don't want to make my daughters afraid to live life. I don't want them to view everyone they meet with suspicion. I want them to believe that most people are decent folks who will behave decently in most situations. And yet that level of trust can be dangerous. It's a combination of luck, good parenting, and strong will on my part that I never found myself in a situation like that. Luck, because I never fell in with friends who drank a lot - at least, not until university, and even then they were responsible about it, ensuring that a few people remained sober at every party in case things got out of hand. Good parenting, because my parents made sure they knew where I was and taught me the dangers of alcohol and excess. Strong will, or possibly strong inhibitions, because I was not a follower. If I had found myself in a position where I was afraid for my safety, I would have left. What if one of those elements is missing from my daughters' lives?
I have little control over luck, but I hopefully will be able to influence it, helping them choose friends and nurture friendships with good kids, and getting to know those kids' parents. But the rapist in the newspaper is widely regarded in his home town as a good kid who went horribly wrong on that night. And the teen scene in Hamilton is scary. Drugs, alcohol, pornography - these are standard elements of underage parties, at ages when kids aren't ready to deal with them, and it's normal for parties to have too little parental supervision.
I have a great deal of control over good parenting. My kids will see me using alcohol responsibly, on an occasional basis. They won't grow up afraid of it, but with a healthy respect for it. I will teach them that there's no harm in small amounts of alcohol, once they're of age or while they're supervised by adults we trust, but that doing anything to excess is a bad idea, as is standing by while others do things to excess. I will teach them to recognize when a situation is getting out of hand, and the order of operations of things to do about it. I will teach them that I would rather they call home and have me come get them from a bad situation, than stay out of fear of what I'll say, and possibly see the situation get worse. Hopefully, my girls will mostly stay out of such bad situations, and when they do get into them, they'll have the good sense to get themselves out before it gets worse. The key, always, is communication and respect for authority. They have to believe that a) I know what I'm talking about; b) I have their best interests at heart; c) the limits I place are reasonable and need to be respected; and d) if they make a mistake, they will earn points with me if they take steps to correct it or get me to correct it - that helping oneself is always a good decision.
Strong will is partly personality, but it's also partly about having confidence in one's own opinions, instincts and decisions. As such, strong will is partially a development of good parenting. It's also a function of peer relationships. If my girls are leaders in their social groups, they'll reduce the chances of getting caught up in something nasty. If they have enough moral certitude to say no when their friends are doing things that make them uncomfortable, they will probably be fine. Developing that kind of will is the work of a lifetime, and it has already begun. Elizabeth is basically a confident kid, insofar as a child in an egocentric developmental stage can be called confident. By the time she's six, most of the groundwork for a self-confident adult will have been laid.
Sometimes it's scary having a decent grasp of child psychology/developmental timelines. Six years isn't very long. Gradually releasing them into a world that contains this kind of evil is one of the hardest things I'll ever have to do.
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