Perspective Plus discussion

I was flipping stations yesterday and heard an afternoon talk show discussing bullying. One of the hosts made a comment that she felt that parents needed to by made accountable for their children if their children were bullies. According to a lot of press lately, bullying seems to be even worse now than it was 20 years ago. I think 9/11 has made it more in our faces due to racial tension. But, I do not deny with the advent of the internet that bullying has taken on new forms. There have been several stories over the last 5 years about children killing themselves over bullying.

Long gone is the image of Scut Farkus and his "honest to God, GREEN teeth" demanding lunch money and twisting your arm to make you say "uncle". When I was younger, it was called teasing and you were just supposed to deal with it, shake it off and use "sticks and stones..." to brush it away. Bullies were face to face and you knew who they were. Things like "fatty, fatty 2x4" and the like were the norm and you either cried or walked away trying not to let them see they got to you.

Then and now, people are afraid to report bullying to anyone for fear of repercussions. It used to be you told your mom, she called the other kids mom. Done. Next day, the bully either said "sorry" or beat the tar out of you. Many parents, again, then and now, have the "not my child" syndrome because their child never does stuff in front of them, is an Eddie Haskel type, or they are in denial about their child, either due to feeling like they have failed or fear of being accused of being a bad parent.

Holding a parent responsible for their child's actions to me is not a bad thing. Facing fines, community service, and the like,may not be a bad thing. But what about the parents who bully? Should their child be held accountable for them? The adult who supposed to know and do better and set the example of proper behavior (at least according to my classes they are)sometimes takes it upon themselves to bully other students in their child's class because of some misguided revenge or small part of themselves who was bullied and they feel that they are defending their child.

But what of bullies who are adults who go after other adults? How do you make them accountable? There are few protections for adults as we are seen as being able to control ourselves and "know better", but we don't. Maybe it is some latent hangover from childhood that makes us "take it" and do nothing. Bullying happens to all shapes, sizes, backgrounds,religions and orientations. Bullying is based on fear and misinformation. Bullying is an ancient, biologically driven trigger born out of survival of the fittest.

But if we are so evolved, whey do we still do it?

O.K. in my previous post I talked about bullying from others, but what happens when we bully ourselves? You know that little voice in your head that just needs to shut the *bleep* up? The one that needs to chill out and get laid? That wonderful little nag that tells you to give up, that you don't matter,that you are worthless, etc.

How do you hold yourself accountable for that?

You don't. You don't hold yourself accountable for it, because that makes the voice win. You give it the time it needs to whine, maybe a few Oreos and move on. That's right, move on. Everyone has fears and bullying comes from fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of different things, things that do not look like ourselves. Otherness used to mean possible danger. Now, not so much. So, know your fear and give it space, but don't let it rule you.

Sounds simple, but it is one of the hardest things to do. Fear is a something that we are all born with. Fear of being alone, fear of losing our freedoms, fear of the dark, spiders, heights, thunder etc. It' all there. We get bullied by others and then do it to ourselves when we don't live up to an expectation. We listen to that voice that says whatever we don't need to hear. Many listen, many wallow in it. Others give themselves a pep talk and move on.

How do you move on? You will when you are ready. This morning, I wallowed in the little voice because I am too afraid to address something between me, one of my best friends, and a good friend who doesn't even know there's a problem because I am terrified to mention it to either of them. It manifested with me wanting to cut off all of my waist length hair and the boyfriend threatening to throw the scissors out the window. Not one of my best moments.

I let myself be bullied by myself. I didn't have any Oreos, but I knew what I was doing and I know better. To bad there isn't community service for the soul. I think I need it.

I think that the underlying issue is not as much that we need to "punish" the inner bully, but that we must learn to forgive ourselves. We blame ourselves for getting fat, for bowing the diets, for not being skinny, etc etc etc. We have to accept ourselves, embrace ourselves, love ourselves. Then, we can forgive ourselves and hopefully make peace with the inner bully. And yes, I am still working on that.

That is why we need community service for the soul. It would be like forgiveness workshop. Punishing ourselves is what that little voice already does. What we need to do is get it to be quiet, and only pop up when it is important, like NOT eating something we really don't need to be eating, instead of it making us feel badly about ourselves. We get enough of that from the world around us and that just feeds that little voice.

Like I said, it is not easy and we are all works in progress.

I heard this on CNN on Saturday, but I did not have a chance to really discuss it or research it until today. Apparently, a 7 year old child hanged himself with a belt due to being bullied so badly. According to his parents, they had no idea that bullying was happening nor did his school. What happened to this child that this was his only option? How does a 7 year old even know how to hang themselves? Was he really just horsing around and accidentally did this or was it truly on purpose? We may never know.

There was a discussion with a "noted child psychologist" who was asked about why we are seeing so much more bullying, especially with girls. He remarked that girls are becoming more aggressive as we push them to be stronger,which goes against the trend of the last several years of being good looking. Still, when I was 7, I wouldn't have known how to kill myself, let alone do it. As I aged, yes I entertained the idea, and yes part of it was from being picked on and teased by my peers. Some of it was just how I processed the world around me,actual and imagined, and part from how my home life was at the time. Did I ever try anything, no,but that does not lessen the feelings I had at the time.

I feel for this young boy and his family. No one asked for this and as long as human nature refuses to accept "other" as an option, this will continue. We can have all the vigils and seminars you want. But as long as we hide behind racial, religious, health,gender and other ideals, we will never truly end bullying. To end bullying, we would have to change too much as a whole society, a world, and as individuals and that would be too hard for many to do. Too many are entrenched in their ways, their thoughts and feelings to ever let go. Good or bad, I fear that humans have evolved as far as they are ever going to, and no amount of stories like this are going to change anything.

I know most of you have probably heard about the Michigan teen who was elected to the homecoming court as a joke by classmates.

For those of you haven't here is a link:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/28/us/mich...

I am proud of this girl for finding the strength to stand up,hold her head high and take her rightful place in the court. She was elected after all,regardless of the reason. I too know this pain. I was nominated for homecoming queen my senior year as a joke, with a "Carrie" type of thing planned if I had won. (The girl who did deserved it.) It hurt to know I didn't win (the "Carrie" thing came out later) and I was upset.

I applaud that this girl took the challenge handed to her and did the noble thing. She looked wonderful and I applaud the local businesses for supporting her and for once, Faceplant was a good thing. We need more people in this world who support the victims and not the bullies.

Yet again, one of our young has committed suicide due to extreme bullying. A 12 year old girl in Florida is the latest young person to cave under pressure from on-line and in-person bullying. She was bullied with comments like "why don't you die?" and "why don't you kill yourself?" It was not specified if she was a larger sized girl, but computer searches listed in her history did reveal that at least one topic was "how much should a 12 year old girl weigh?".

It is items in the news like this that make me feel that all our anti-bulling efforts are for naught. With the anonymous ways to post things on-line, too many people feel empowered to say what they will and d*** the consequences. I am for one am of those who is glad that on-line life was NOT a thing when I was in school. Email was just catching on and pagers were the thing. If you wanted to harass someone, you had to it face to face. You knew who your tormentors were.

Now, you don't always know who is saying what to you. There was a big problem 2 weeks ago and one last week at a gay bar at the end of Paul's street. Police were called repeatedly to the first incident and failed to arrive until it was all over. They listed it as a robbery, when it really was a hate crime. Last week, a 13 year old was arrested when a gang of young people again tried to start something. This too is bullying, and if a 13 year old is goaded into this against adults, that what hope do we have for our other youth?

Fear starts at home. Children hear their parents make comments,hear things at church, and from other sources. They hear these things even when adults thing they can't hear. They hear the slurs, the righteous messages and the like and start to think it themselves. Perhaps mom thinks she's fat, so she diets constantly, and so little Sally thinks fat is bad. So now little Sally is convinced that ALL fat people are bad.

Thus it starts. Little things like this, small things like how we see ourselves trickle down the line to our kids and their insecurities. I feel that the rise in bullying is stemming from the rah-rah parenting advice that was prevalent about 10 years ago. The idea was to support your child with praise for EVERYTHING! Did chores? Praise. Didn't hit their sister? Praise. Did crappy work? Praise. All of this ego feeding has now lead to senses of entitlement where none is due and a sense of superiority,again,where it does not count.

We need as a whole to really re-examine who WE are first and how we are raising our kids. The bully used to be the big dumb kid who took your lunch money. Now, teachers are too scared of the legal system to step in and prevent bullying. Parents are quick to denial and kids are running rampant. Survival of the fittest is turning to survival of the most litigious.

Religious sentiments and "rights" are also leading to socially acceptable discrimination and bullying all in the name of highly and broadly interpreted being who may or may not truly care who is shagging whom and is more concerned with keeping the Universe running!

I don't have a solution, but I am hoping for one.

Part of it starts with a return to parenting. We need to have people act like parents and not friends. Your kid steps out of line, whoop his or her rear end. There are pads of fatty tissue there, and a hand on the backside never hurt anyone. There is a VAST difference between correction and abuse, and the lack of correction has led to the situation with our youth today.

When I was growing up, if I got in trouble at school, I had to answer Mom when I got home. THEN I got it again from Dad when he got in from work. I only got into trouble at school a VERY few times.

Correction did not make me fear my parents, teachers or school administration. I DID, however, NOT want to face the consequences of my actions. Therefore, I did not do the things that got me into trouble.

I respected my teachers. I respected the school administrators. I respected AND loved my parents. I respected their friends. I knew how to address adults, I knew how to interact with others and I still know how to do those things.

As a teacher, I am not allowed to correct my students in any form or fashion. Give a writing assignment as punishment? Have the father in my classroom demanding to know WHY I targeted his child. In special needs education, the student has to do something remarkably bad to get suspended, and can ONLY be suspended 10 day out of the year. No matter what he or she does.

Any time we contact the parents of a child for misbehavior, assuming we CAN get in contact with them, the parent is not likely to back up the teacher. We are much more likely to either be threatened physically or threatened with a lawsuit than to have a parent ask what their child did and how to help the situation.

Just my three cents' worth.

I agree. I myself see first hand the ridiculous levels we have reached with our children in an effort to protect their precious psyches. No red ink, not correcting spelling mistakes, allowing children to make decisions (where in the crap was THAT when I was a kid?) and all around lack of hands off parenting is what is making our kids do things like this. I am all for spanking a child, NOT beating them, but a few carefully well placed swats with YOUR open hand and NOT on a bare bottom, can reinforce a lesson when ALL else has FAILED.

The key here is most kids do not have consistent consequences if they have any at all for behavior that would have gotten me in a position that I still wouldn't be able to sit down from now. I try to respect my kids and expect respect back from them. I do not tolerate back talk, hitting, or any other disrespectful behavior. I let my kids have fun, sure, and I do let them be kids, but I also insist on showing respect for others,their property and the like.

I went to a parochial school where my parents were told upfront that they used corporal punishment as a last resort. When I think of some of the creative things some of my teachers did over the years to instill discipline,they would be arrested now. It was nothing bad, but by today's standards, it would be. For example, one teacher made students who were talking out of turn (and I was not one of them, which may be hard for some of you to believe) put spoon in their mouths. In first grade, we got stamps to place in a booklet we made. You owed the teacher a stamp and a kiss on the cheek if you wanted to use the restroom when it was not break time or broke a rule. Now, she's be on some child predator site or some such.

I am not saying we need to go back to the dark ages, and bullying happened back in the day too, but we do need to return to some semblance of self responsibility and back off from this "my child could NEVER do...." and being so quick to file a lawsuit over every tiny thing. The kids who are truly in trouble then don't get the help they need because of too much red tape.

Bullying is not caused by spanking. If that were true, then I would be the biggest bully on the block and would never have been a victim of it. I was not spanked, I was hit with a belt. I was terrified of my dad most of my life, including adulthood, because I never knew what he would do or what threat he would live up to. I never give my kids a punishment I don't intend to carry out. Yes, I have reduced a punishment when I think my emotions got the better of me, and I tell them so, but I also add that if the behavior happens again that day, the original punishment stands. I make sure the kids know why what they did was wrong, why I'm upset, and what will happen if they do it again.

I was raised with 1) If you get into trouble at school, you WILL be in trouble at home 2) BOTH of my parents would have my rear in a sling and 3) I would most likely still be in trouble now. I did not ever get into direct trouble in school. There were one or two times we had as a class to write lines, but it was the WHOLE class since the teacher did not know who did what.

Try that now, and you would have such a lawsuit.....

That is the problem. Litigious parents, litigious society, everyone is a victim, no one takes responsibility for their own actions. It's violent video games, being spanked, fake color google, too much sugar, too many ding a lings,too much interference from parents, not enough love, too much love, being looked at cross-eyed when you were in utero,or any other nonsense you can come up with.

We hide behind too may things,like religion,cultural standards, litigation, and what not too keep from having to actually DO SOMETHING about raising our kids well. We have put so much on schools over the years, things that SHOULD be taught at home and aren't, and when our kids fall behind the rest of the world, we throw more tests at them....sorry I get carried away about this sometimes.

Point being, the more we put on kids,the more control they seek, the more bullying is going to happen. The more we cause our kids to not like themselves, the more they are going to lash out at they don't understand. With on-line EVERYTHING,there is no more conversation, there is no more having to deal with a variety of people day to day. You can just go find people who think and look like you and everyone else toss it all.

Our kids are becoming xenophobic against our own society, and we are allowing it to happen, one text at a time.

I'm a teacher and a parent. I would love to think that when the time comes to send my son to school, the teachers there will be able to prevent his ever being victimized by a bully. I know that's not possible, though. I simply don't see or hear most of the bullying that goes on in my classroom, as as you all have already pointed out, if I do catch someone at it, their parents almost always rush to their defense.

I have run up against the xenophobia in my classroom. My students are tougher than most, though, since I teach at a continuation high school where the other high schools in the district send their kids. If you are curious about a particularly negative experience I had last year, you can read about it on my personal blog (as opposed to my writing blog) here:
http://sophiamartin-family.blogspot.c...

Anyway, I wish I could stop bullying. The best I was able to do recently when I got an openly gay student who was very afraid of the rest of the students was to have him sit next to me sort of behind my desk, until he gained confidence. To the credit of my students, they did not decide to victimize him, at least that I witnessed. He eventually decided to start sitting at a regular desk on his own. But I've had students placed in my class who have very serious problems, who have demonstrated that they cannot or will not behave appropriately in a classroom, and yet they are still placed at our school. For instance, they recently returned a young man to our school who was initially kicked out because he was caught pleasuring himself in my classroom (he was alone at the time). We have no school counselor of any kind. None of us has any special training. We are not equipped to handle students with severe emotional problems like this young man, and yet they keep placing them with us. There are days (unfortunately more and more frequently) when I really think I need to find a new career. I keep hoping my books will start really selling, so I can quit. And I used to LOVE teaching.

Sorry, I made this about me. I didn't intend to. My point is that I agree with you all and yet I don't have a solution either! :(

Oh dear gods, Sophia. I am sorry that you had such a horrible experience. It just reinforces my inner thoughts, though. I have always wanted to teach. Truth be told, I think I was "bitten by the bug" when I saw Mary and Laura Ingalls go into teaching watching Little House on the Prairie (first run, not reruns).

I came to the decision to actually go into teaching about 11 years ago. I have been doggedly pursuing that ever since. I have a bachelor's in Special Needs Mild-Moderate, a Master's in Curriculum & Instruction, my teaching license, the Reading endorsement and the English as a Second Language endorsement. I am also only about 6 credit hours away from the Master's plus 30 level. And I have yet to get a position teaching. I am $150,000 in debt in exchange for tutoring a special needs student in reading for $10 an hour. Whee.

And yet I still want to teach. Or at least I did. I did my undergrad practicum and student teaching in the Cleveland Municipal School District, and my ESL practicum at Cleveland State University working with adults. With what I have seen as the parent of a CMSD student, and the teaching that I HAVE done in Cleveland, I am starting to lose all interest in actually going into the classroom. I am good with kids, REALLY good with kids. I enjoy teaching. But I do NOT enjoy the crap that comes with it now.

I have seen administrators forced to make an under-qualified teacher take over a moderate-severe autism room in which students larger than her regularly stripped and ran down the hall or threw computers across the room. I have had students tell me they would "pop a cap in her" when I asked what they would do if a cashier short-changed them and they could not do the math to see that they had been cheated. Mind you, this was in a K-2 self contained sped room. I have seen parents refuse to attend IEP meetings, refuse to pick their children up until the doors were ready to be locked, blindness not listed on an IEP because the parent never made the school aware of the problem and so very, very much more. All this being actually in the classroom for the equivalent of one school year plus one college semester.

We can't teach curriculum, we have to teach to the test, teach how to take the test, teach manners, morals, mores, and then maybe... JUST maybe... throw in a little Scope & Sequence.

I wanted to teach WHY again???

Sophia, no worries my dear. You help to make my point.

I come from a family of teachers on my mom's side. My grandpa's brother married an teacher,their daughters were teachers, one married a teacher, and both of their sons are either married to a teacher or is a teacher. The teacher couple are now retired, him a principal, her special ed. I have heard do many stories over the years of how classrooms have denigrated to war zone like spaces due to over crowding and our "not my problem" attitudes.

As I have stated, where I went to school nonsense was not tolerated. I have no clue what it is like now, but since Lutheran and Catholic schools are not too far off, I imagine it is similar to what I experienced, but with computers. Paul, I think that what you have done tutoring (he tutors one of my "nieces")has done her more good than she would have ever gotten in school. I have two other "special needs" one "niece" and "nephew" who have struggled with the school system. In this case, their mother was fighting the school to enforce IEP status and force them to do what they were required to do.

It is hard enough for special ed teachers do their jobs, and with budget cuts, testing nonsense and other requirements, it is getting out of hand. We need to make parents more responsible for their children, and schools less so. We need to stop this atmosphere of fear we have created with our children, our schools,our society. Teachers need to be able to say "Your child is not perfect and I will NOT put up with them doing _______ in my class room any longer."

Why we become teachers or nannies is because WE want to be a good influence. Teaching was (and is) a noble profession,but teachers are not allowed to TEACH anymore. You have to pander to the lowest common denominator and as Sophia's personal blog post attests, that is where it all falls apart. (See I read links.)

Our whole society is falling apart due to trying to please everyone all the time. With apologies to Lincoln,"You can please some of the people some of the time. You can please all of the people all of the time, but you will never get them to agree to gay marriage, gun restrictions,women's rights, abortion, or racial equality. Ever."

As long as there are those who hold onto their beliefs with their dying breaths, we will have bullies. As long as there is someone who feels superior to others, we will have bullies. As long as someone has low self esteem we will have bullies. As long as we remain outside the Borg, we will have bullies (After the Assimilation we will BE the bullies).


We need to regain control of ourselves and our kids or we are truly on the eve of destruction.

Last week, two young men over the course of a week, both seemingly became more of the bullying victims who have chosen to end their lives to escape. In the midst of this tragedy, a truly wonderful thing happened. I applaud the effort of this students or students.

http://news.yahoo.com/students-223645...


This of course has re-engaged the debate about cyber bullying and in school bullying. I fear that we are ever going to change this growing bully culture as the internet is so anonymous and freeing for so many who feel that social constructs do not apply to them in this space. Social interaction has simply been thrown aside in favor of a screen and some buttons. Updates about the lint in someone belly button holds more fascination than actually speaking to the person in front of you, or your phone calls being more important than the person you are with, all leads to the breakdown of our society.

Basic courtesy has been replaced by a small screen that lets us be whom we wish with out consequence. Don't like what others have to say, un-friend them with a click. Video games are a small portion of what has made our society devolve into what is has become.

And yet, when you read a story like this one, that someone has decided to try to put some kind of compassion, some kind of small encouragement, it makes you feel that all may not be lost, and that we do have hope after all.

So,I say to all of you: Remember who you are. YOU are wonderful. YOU are smart. YOU are YOU and YOU are the best YOU YOU can be.

There are some commercial's running right now for a free on-line K-12 school available here in Ohio. I have no overall problem with on-line schools, especially if you live in a rural or a not so great school district, so that children can get a good education. That said,some of the commercials that show actual students, are saying they chose this school because they were being bullied.

Okay, fine, I can see why this choice was made, but it upsets me to think that if the bullying was that bad to make you leave school, doesn't that mean the bullies won? I am all for a good education for all, but if we decide that this trend of on-line/at home schooling is the best way to combat bullying, than how are we supposed to teach our children, let alone ourselves, that differences are to be embraced?

If we do not put ourselves into face to face contact on a regular basis with others, than we risk falling apart as a society, do we not? Video chat services can go only so far to give us contact with others. We need to be with other humans to be able to become better people. Is on-line the way to go for some? Yes, I am not saying it is a bad thing, I am just saying that we need to be careful for the reasons we use on-line schools for younger students.

And let's not forget that if the online school allows communication between students, then bullying can still occur anyway. So, no, that's not really a good reason to switch to an online school.

I had a point yesterday, but my brain farted on the rest of it. I got a mailer from the on-line school in question yesterday. Yes,me who DOES NOT HAVE CHILDREN got a mailer from the school. I promptly called and asked to be removed from the list, stressing that I do not have children. I was told that they will see what they can do....if the people who work there were educated by this on-line school, they need to work on people skills....

Sometimes.... the bullies DO win. They win when the adults in charge either ignore, don't believe or worse yet join in the bullying. They win when their victim(s) commit suicide because they can't take it any more.They win when an LGBT student burrows further into the closet rather than being him or her self. They win when the non-Christian student carries a small Bible or bows a head in prayer.

Our society proudly claims to be in support of equal rights for all, but the truth is shown when the security guard follows the black teenager around the store, the police crack jokes about the "fag" on the force, the too-thin snobs stare in derision at the woman that carries 20 extra pounds after childbirth.

I hate what America has devolved into.

I work in a school and I currently teach a student through independent study (similar to homeschooling) who left the same school I work in due to bullying. He's a gay kid and experienced bullying at the hands of four other students.

When he first approached the principal about the bullying we did an investigation. Students were questioned. We got ahold of the footage from the school bus from the last several weeks. We were unable to prove that any bullying had occurred. Did we believe that it did? Yes. Could we do anything about it, like kick out the kids he named? No. The best we could do was grant his request to go on IS.

To be honest, I was reluctant to even pursue the investigation, because I felt it would put him at risk. I felt that if any of the accused bullies (one in particular) felt that they were in danger of being punished for the way they had treated him, the bully might hurt my student in a reprisal. Would that student then go to jail? No doubt. But I didn't want my student to have to get hurt in the process of that.

I guess my point is, it's a really complicated thing to deal with. I wish we'd found evidence on those bus tapes. But we didn't, and then it becomes his word against theirs. None of the other students would corroborate my student's story.

The conclusion I (and others) have come to is that the only way to make a significant change with the bullying problem in America is for the students who are bystanders to become willing to intervene in some way. We teachers and administrators, more often than not, *want* to stop it from happening. If it happened in front of us, there would be no question. But it doesn't, for the most part. It happens in front of their peers. If their peers were willing to come forward and tell us, we could do something. Without proof, our hands are tied. After all, it is not unheard of for bullies to accuse their own victims of bullying (I've seen it happen).

I've seen one documentary on bullying that showed some pretty lame administrators as well as blatant bullying going on on a bus where the driver did nothing. That sort of thing infuriates me as much as it does anyone else. I don't think it's the norm. The norm is that the adults involved want to stop it. They want to make everything safe for everyone. But they can't.

I think that bullying will never truly stop on any level because of human nature and the need to feel superior to somebody, anybody, who is different so that that one person can feel better about themselves. Unfortunately, we have a deeply inbred need to believe that being different is death, which goes back to our primordial days when the slow and sick could get you killed,not blending in would bring attention to the predators and could get you killed.

This has morphed into the opiate of the masses, religion, that has taken the ideas of different and twisted them to suit whatever purpose the religion of choice decided that they wanted to present. This then has lead to unfortunate attitudes toward people of different ethnic groups, race,gender,gender preference and others for various reasons.

Bullies occur on many levels for many reasons. No matter how hard you try to teach your child about tolerance and expose them to different people, you still have to deal with herd mentality when they get among their peers, and that combined with all the new and improved technological ways we can torture ourselves, that is the perfect recipe for bullying.

I am not saying an on-line education in not good nor is it a bad thing, but IF and only IF it becomes the solution for bullying, then I feel we are headed for a place that we may never come back from. We are devolving into an "everyone is not as important as me" and this is what is leading to us not having to face what we do is wrong.

We need to change not only the idea of a bystander not allowing what is happening, but parents need to stop putting their heads in the sand and denying that their children could be doing this, or defending their child's actions. Too many "rights" are being defended,so many that the rights that need defending are not.

That is the saddest thing.

In the "you GOT to be S@%$#ing me!" category:

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/societ...

Not only does whoever made up that flyer live in their own little world, nobody there will admit knowing them. That looks like something you'd see in a parody film about life in the 50s. Not in the actual 50s, mind you.

This ran on Yahoo! today

https://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/sch...


I know it is a re-te3lling of the above link, but I feel that the guide itself is clearer in the picture.


Narzain, you are so right. It does seem like a parody or even one of those books you see on being a good housewife from some 50's life skills class.

I think that this may a little much....

http://www.pasadenajournal.com/news-i...

I don't know. It has to be addressed, it has to be taken seriously as the threat it really is. A quote from the article:
"Suicide has been identified by the Center for Disease Control as the third leading cause of death in teenagers and victims of bullying and cyberbullying are statistically more likely to have suicide ideation and suicide attempts."

Bullying is no longer just one kid on the school grounds taking your lunch money or chanting fatty fatty 2 x 4.... it has gotten a lot more serious and even deadly than it was when I was a kid. I think it does need to be criminalized and punished accordingly... BUT.... what line do you draw, and where? When does it go from kids being kids to criminal activity? There is the big problem with what is proposed, in my eyes, rather than the fact it WAS proposed.

My issue with this, as with many other "let's pass a law so it looks like we have a handle on the situation" problems, is enforcement. As a country, we have a hard enough time accurately and swiftly enforcing punishment for high-end crimes (murder, sexual assault, etc.), let alone "lesser" crimes. Not to downplay the seriousness of bullying; I acknowledge that it is a big problem that needs to be dealt with. I'm just not sure that this is an effective way to do that.

That's my point. A city ordinance was passed on this? A CITY ordinance was passed...how about just parenting your child? I know bullying is getting a lot of attention right now, and with social media, it is either more likely to happen,hard to control or makes us more aware of the fall out. Yet,I strongly feel that if more kids were parented and not coddled, told "No" more often and truly understood consequences, that this may not be the overall major problem it's become. I am not convinced that bullying has become more pervasive, but more clever.

I think that since kids today are overall not taught how to handle things, that we are seeing more lashing out. Kids hit their parents and do not face any kind of consequence or punishment, so what do they understand about life beyond the end of their nose?

This is why we have "affluenza" defenses in court and other nonsense. These so called privacy laws hog tie schools from being able to do much and it doesn't happen on school property, then they really have no say in what happened.

Again, it is drawing lings, and where to stop,and I think that this gesture line is one too far.

It stems, I think, from the fact that people do NOT parent their children. "They" don't believe (and are likely correct) that parenting can be legislated. Your child does ____? You pay a $_____ fine or go to jail. The public would NEVER allow that to pass. "How DARE you infringe on MY rights or question MY parenting skills?" I have heard that argument with my own ears from a repeat, pattern child abuser. How dare I? Simple. You have NO parenting skills and your child is a raging brat.

Until we can find a way to force "sperm donors" and "baby incubators" to really become parents.... the only option is to do SOMETHING with the kids. It goes WAY beyond bullying in schools. These same children are the ones roaming the streets in packs shooting other children, beating lone gay men, and stealing vehicles to "joyride" and party in. These breeders WILL NOT parent their children, and if they try social services leap to the "rescue" (while allowing child abusers to repeat for years before intervening in a meaningful way).

What is the answer? Which way do we go? I don't know... but if SOMETHING isn't done, what little remains of our society is truly doomed.

As a society, we have gone too far on somethings and not gone far enough in others. This is the fall out of the 1960's with the whole counter culture movement. Not all things that came out of this movement were bad, but some ideas have taken on a life that was perhaps not the original intent, like so many things do as they grow beyond their time. Ideas of less strict punishments came out of fighting against the ideas of child rearing that had been used by their parents and grandparents which were how they did it in the "old country". Ethnic groups stayed together and raised children in a community. If Mrs.So-and-So saw you take an apple without paying, she had the right to punish you for it, tell your parents and they would punish you as well.

I was raised with "if you get in trouble at school, you will be in double at home." In this day and age of CCTV, cell phone cameras and other recording devices, you cannot deal with your child without being seen as an abuser. Speak loudly to your child, get arrested. One well placed swat on a diapered behind, and get arrested, never mind that this was the last resort after months of trying other means, and it goes on. Mrs. So-and-So can no longer call you out for bad behavior or she can get sued for libel, let alone do anything about it.

If kids were punished like adults when they commit a crime, then I think we would see less of this. If getting sent to Juvie followed you around and your crimes as a minor could and did affect the rest of your life, things may change as accountability would be in effect.

That is the key word here, accountability. We have lost the notion of you do something wrong, you are accountable. Period. No twinkie defense, no I was temporarily insane. You did wrong, you make amends. You face a consequence. We should be able to say "your child is a brat" and not be sued for libel. If it takes a village to raise a child, then the villages are full of idiots.