Well, don't I feel stupid! Today is the last day of National No-Name Calling Week, and I almost missed the whole thing.
According to the National Day site:
Name-calling, insults, and words in general cause harm. In children and adults, unkind words leave marks we can’t see and often cannot be easily undone. Over time, the abuse results in poor grades, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, depression, and even suicide. Our children deserve the support of parents, educators, and administrators, and this observance brings everyone together under one cause.
That sounds pretty serious. And actually it is pretty serious, but it's also incredibly hard to police. The fact is, adults like to heap abuse upon one another, so it's hard for them to tell the kids not to do it. If a guy is telling the wife over dinner that his boss is a [redacted] and his coworkers are [redacted redacted], is it surprising when his kid tells someone on the schoolyard that he's a [redacted]? Especially if the other kid is a [redacted].
In a general sense I think it's a nice idea to call out this kind of behavior and encourage kids to find more constructive ways of looking at one another and dealing with things they don't like. Otherwise they may grow up spend four years blaming all their problems on some clown in the White House and never seek to improve their own stupid lives. They become adults who have no principles and come across as not particularly bright. Naming, blaming, and shaming are all we ever do these days.
Publisher Simon & Schuster has a site dedicated to No Name-Calling Week, which was based on a book called The Misfits by author James Howe. Of course, Simon & Schuster just canceled Senator Josh Hawley's book, blaming the so-called Capitol Hill riot on him, so the publisher is neither principled nor particularly bright.
Basically, I think adults should stop name-calling if they really want children to do the same. "Deplorables," "bitter clingers," "typical white people," "tea baggers," "knuckle-dragging yahoos," all sorts of nasty names may be heard from the same school officials who weep if seven-year-old Timmy calls another kid a booger. When will this cycle of meanness end?
Say -- when I called myself stupid at the top of this entry, if I'm rubber and you're glue, does that mean I ricocheted the insult off myself and onto you? Heh heh heh.
Bullying is complicated and takes different forms and the victims are not all the same so, the one size fits all solutions you get from officials are usually no that helpful.
ReplyDeleteI tried to explain that with a friend whose daughter took part in a conference in DC with such anti-bullying experts as Al Franken. He gave me a liberal-type response implying I was pro-bullying. Sigh.
I can't stand bullies for the record.
I can't stand bullies for the record.
ReplyDeleteSame here, guys. I got skipped a grade in my youth, & became a serious target when I earned better grades than many of my classmates. Dad taught me to fight, & that was the end of that. Taking one or two bullies down not only solved my "being bullied" problem; I found out years later that other classmates who'd been getting the ****-end of the stick realized that just fighting back, win, lose or draw, often stopped the bullying behavior.
Agree with you smart chaps, of course. And Stiiv, I was friends with a kid I guess would be considered autistic now -- nice enough but bizarre and a magnet for bullies. One day he went all karate in the hall on one of them, making the HI YA kind of yell and dropping into a battle position. He still looked like a largeish hamster could knock him over. But the kids riding him were so flustered, so certain that he was outfoxing them (or maybe that their bullying was about to be exposed to the teacher), that they left him alone. Far as I know, those two dummies never bugged him again.
ReplyDeleteOn a better note, tomorrow is National Pie Day
ReplyDeleterbj
Much better.
ReplyDelete