‘Bully Pulpit’: Is anti-bullying hysteria harming our kids?
LATELY, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the principal’s office. My eight-year-old son, an affectionate, funny, Bambi-eyed charmer, is also a hothead. Over the past six months, he’s received one official suspension and an unofficial one, along with warnings and detentions for fighting, shoving, cursing, and kicking.
When my parents were children and even, to a degree, when I was, this behaviour was dismissed as boys being boys (girls, inclined to be more sly in their cruelty, didn’t figure much in this accounting). But my son and his friends are growing up in an era of zero tolerance for violence, where the line between aggressor and victim is thickly drawn. In the past year or so, several young people have killed themselves after facing torment from their peers, and the issue of bullying has been taken up passionately by politicians, educators, activists, and celebrities. Yet bullying is more than just a simple matter of good kid versus bad kid, as the public conversation would have it. My son, for instance, has taken his own share of licks: an older boy once punched him in the face and gave him a bloody nose; another time, a schoolmate held him down and spat on him. It shows how thoroughly we have vilified acts of aggression between children that I feel an odd relief when my child is the one being picked on. At least someone else’s kid is to blame.
Let me be clear: bullying is a serious problem, and it breaks my heart to see my son — or any child — on either side of the equation. But the current discussion about bullying reflects a generational amnesia. Kids today didn’t invent ganging up on each other any more than they did sex, drugs, or sullenness. Our anxiety about bullying seems at times like a stand-in for a more generalized angst: we feel sucker punched by the slumped economy and taunted by ever-advancing technology, pushed around by governments, banks, and our bosses. Those feelings, coupled with a near-maniacal focus on our children — the helicopter model of parenting — have caused us to shove our worries under a quick-fix banner and download them onto our kids.