Kidcest
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Kidcest
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Best Friends/Worst Enemies:
Understanding the Social Lives of Our Children,
By Michael G. Thompson, Ph.D.and Catherine O'Neill Grace
In a Different Voice, by Carol Gilligan
The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, by Wendy Mogel
Raising Lifelong Learners: A Parent's Guide by Lucy McCormick Calkins
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Once there were three little girls, Kathy, Lilly and Susan. They were all new to my school in the seventh grade and had come from different schools. But in eighth grade, when they were together, they turned themselves into a gang that was mean to other kids with increasing frequency and ferocity. Teachers knew it was happening, but the girls were clever and slippery. We could rarely catch them in a teachable moment or a punishable act. The most we could do was talk to them. As you can imagine, that didn’t change anything.
One afternoon, at the bus stop across the street from school they approached Johnny, a sixth grader who wasn’t so good with other people. He walked with his head down looking at his feet with his shoulders pulled over him like a turtle shell. Sitting there on the bench he must have been slouched like a turtle with its arms and legs in.
By all accounts, including one from a teacher who watched the episode from the other side of the avenue, the girls approached the bench, told Johnny to get up because they wanted to sit on the bench. Johnny did. They mocked him for a while and then, as the humiliations built to a crescendo, one of the girls threw her half-finished smoothie. It hit him in the chest and spilled banana-strawberry slush all down his front.
The next morning, I talked with the students, one at a time, in my office. Even though each of the girls had her own version, each minimizing her role in the affair, none of them took responsibility for the incident. I told them this was serious and that I still had to consider what I would do about it and sent them back to class. Then, I talked with Johnny whose story corroborated the teacher’s report, though in his humiliation he was not enthusiastic to talk about it.
I called Johnny’s home and got his mother on the phone. “I am glad you called me,” she said. “Johnny told me all about it. The stuff was all over him. I was going to call you.”
I told her that I would check in with Johnny and make sure he knows that I will keep him safe here.
I talked to the girls’ mothers and told each of them that I was going to suspend her daughter. That meant they needed to come to school and pick them up as soon as they could.
I told them I would let their daughters return to school when I knew that things would be different. I explained that when their daughters were ready to convince me that things are going to be different, they should call me to set up an appointment.
Kathy’s mom was horrified, and after asking a few questions to get the facts straight she said: “Thank you. I will call you after I talk with her.”
Lilly’s mother was at work and asked if she could pick Lilly up at the end of the day. I said that that was fine, and that she would wait in my office until she arrived. She was angry, but I couldn’t tell if she was angry with me or her daughter.
Susan’s mother came to her daughter’s defense, and decided that I was overreacting, that this was much too small an offense to merit suspension.
When I told the girls that they would be suspended, they were quiet. None of them tried to defend themselves. The only difference was the look on their faces. Kathy’s turned pale. Lilly looked afraid, but Susan had a confident little smile on her face.
That smile! I had seen that look before on a squirrel. One spring a pair of Mourning Doves built a nest outside the window of my office. I was able to watch their progress: the building of the nest, the starting of a family, and the incubation of the eggs. One day, just as I thought I would soon be witnessing the birth of doves, I saw a squirrel approaching along the ledge outside the window. Immediately I started shouting and banging on the window, trying to be as scary as I could. The squirrel just stared at me, as if to say: “You can’t touch me.” Then he proceeded on to the nest and methodically ate the eggs, as I watched, powerless. Susan was giving me the same look.
Kathy and her parents were at my office at 7:30am the next morning. Kathy sat directly across the table from me and spoke first, looking me straight in the eye. “Mr. Ackerly, I know what I did wrong. Even though I didn’t throw the smoothie myself, I was there and I didn’t say anything. I laughed at what was happening, and I know we made Johnny feel bad. I know I was part of what made him feel bad. I feel bad about it, and I want to come back.”
“Do you think that what you did was harassment?”
Pause. “Well, yes, sort of. I participated in harassment.”
“Yes, you did. Can you think of anything you can do to fix it?” Thoughtful look on her face; pause;
“I can’t really fix it. I can talk to Johnny.”
“I don’t know. I would say I’m sorry, but I know that wouldn’t fix it, and I don’t know what else I could do.”
“Is there anything else you can do?”
Long pause. “I can tell you that I will not harass anyone again.”
She looked down at the tabletop, and then back up into my eyes.
“Kathy, good job. I believe you. I want you to come back.” Then to the parents: “Kathy can come to school today. You have a wonderful daughter here. You should be proud of her.”
“We are,” they said. It was 8:05am.
Lilly’s mom called that morning to say with exasperation and dismay in her voice: “Lilly is not ready to come back, yet.” (I knew she probably had to stay home from work. She was a single working mother.)
Susan’s mom, however, called me mid-morning to tell me how inappropriate my handling of the situation was and to insist that her daughter hadn’t hurt anyone. The next morning, she called again, and asked for an appointment with me.
“Yes. When would you like to come in?”
“As soon as possible. My daughter needs to be in school. Don’t you know that my daughter needs to be in school?”
At 9:15am Susan and both her parents arrived in my office. The mother sat directly across from me, her husband to her right, and Susan off to the left, at the head of the table but a bit back from it, slouching in her chair. Her Mom spoke first.
I turned to Susan and asked, “Do you want to come back?”
“What? What do you want me to say? I want to come back.”
“I don’t want you to say anything in particular. I need to know that things are going to be different.”
At this point her mom broke in, “Look we talked to her, she doesn’t think she did anything really wrong, but she admits that she threw the slurpy, and that it hit Johnny even though she was just trying to throw it out and missed, but she says she knows it messed up Johnny’s clothes and she is sorry. She assures us that she will be good. What more do you want?”
“Mrs. Peabody, this is not a court of law. I am not a judge. I am an educator. This is a school, and my responsibility is your daughter’s education. Susan, I need you to take responsibility for what you did. I need to know that you are not going to harass other people. Do you know that you have been mean to other kids?”
“Sometimes, but not more than anyone else. And sometimes people are mean to me.”
“Can you tell me that things are going to be different?”
I looked at both parents. “Susan is not ready to come back. She cannot come to school today. Call me when she is ready.”
“Look,” said the mom. “You are supposed to be an educator. Don’t you know that this behavior is normal?”
“Yes, Mrs. Peabody, this sort of thing can happen. It is normal for kids to be mean to each other. It is also normal for the adults to say ‘No’ to it.”
“Not till I know that things are going to be different.”
Both parents stared at me and then stood up stiffly and gestured to Susan to leave.
Susan and her family were back in my office the next afternoon after school. This time Susan spoke first. Still slouching in her chair some distance from the table, she said. “Mr. Ackerly, I know that what I did was wrong. I hit Johnny with the smoothie. Please let me back in the school.” The look on her face and tone in her voice said: “I know that this is what you want me to say, so I will say it.”
“Will you assure me that you will obey the school rules and in particular that you will not be mean to anyone anymore?”
“Yes,” she said, with that little smile on her face.
In my heart I knew that nothing had changed inside her, but she had minimally done what she needed to do, and said what she needed to say, so I said: “All right. You can come back. But Susan, if you break anymore rules you will leave the school for good. I can’t have anyone here who harasses people.”
Neither Susan nor her parents said anything. Susan still had that confident little smile on her face on her way back to class.
Both Kathy and eventually Lilly, took responsibility for their behavior and for them things were different. They both went on to have a successful year without further incident.
But I realize in retrospect that I missed a step with Susan. I should have asked her to make appropriate apologies and restitution to Johnny. That would have been the right thing to do. Nonetheless, I doubt it would have helped, because in order for Susan to change her parents needed to change. I needed the parents to form a strong partnership with me and Susan’s teachers in order to agree on a strategy that would change Susan’s behavior.
Could I have changed the mother in any way? Could I have worked with the father to make the change necessary? Perhaps. I did want to help Susan, but she didn’t seem to want my help and her mother’s only concern was that she be at allowed back at school; she didn’t want Susan to get the education she needed.
I knew things weren’t going to be different, and they weren’t. Susan’s homeroom teacher, Karen, who also had her all morning for science, algebra and recess, saw me in the lounge after recess to say that she had been perfect all morning long. We began to congratulate ourselves. That was 10:30am. Two hours later, however, Karen told me that Susan had broken six school rules in the last two hours, that she had been completely contemptuous and had topped it all off by spitting in the face of one of her classmates at lunch.
But that is not the end of the story.
Kathy came up at a faculty meeting a month before graduation, as we were talking about awards, as a candidate for the citizenship award. One teacher said that it would be wrong to give it to a student who had been suspended. Another said that Kathy deserved the award, that she had proven herself to be the best citizen in the class by far. She had not only kept out of trouble, but had made many positive contributions to the community of the school. A debate ensued. I was very pleased with the outcome. One teacher who had remained silent for most of the discussion said, “Kathy should definitely get the citizenship award, and the fact that she made a mistake and corrected it is the main reason. We are here to make a difference, and we did. She showed in her behavior that she knew exactly what we are about and wanted to prove it to us. She has to get the award.” The vote was unanimous, and Kathy received the award for citizenship at graduation.
That’s a powerful story! Few educators have the courage and clarity to confront relational aggression in girls. As you say in the story, they can be very slippery! Remember the films Mean Girls and Heathers? The offending girls in those movies were all successful students… flying hurtfully below the adult radar.
I know the little smirk on Susan’s face. Your account led me back my training in restorative justice and restorative discipline. The central questions in that approach are certainly relevant to your story: What harm was done? Who is responsible? How can the harm be repaired? Yet restorative approaches don’t work with offenders who are not ready to take responsibilty for their actions.
What else could be done with Susan…or her parents? I bet your other blog readers will have ideas. I’ll check back.
What else could be done with Susan? Working with kids and their parents I have learned the maxim: If the adults take more responsibility for something than the child, it absolves the child of responsibility. So the next step would be for the parents to learn not to take responsibility for Susan’s behavior and not to protect her from the consequences of that behavior. Kids act and then learn from the results. Whoever is working with Susan should try to get parents and teachers to define what success looks like (e.g. Susan learns that being kind is a better way of being powerful) and define the roles each will play in helping her learn it.
Meanwhile, all is not lost, of course. The world will teach Susan what she needs to learn. The journey will just be longer and harder than if we were all working toward the same goal and were each playing our position so that Susan could learn from taking responsibility.
it seems too, that susan’s parents didn’t model any sort of respect for your concerns about how she handled herself. if her parents were willing to insulate her, why o why would she take any responsibility?
i have an 18 year old niece who is really struggling with taking responsibility for herself and it’s getting her into a lot of trouble. her parents are very angry and it’s been on my mind quite a bit.
for me, the parent of very young children, i realize that it’s tough for a person to BEGIN to take responsibility at 18, when instead they must be guided in the ability to be responsible for themselves at the greatest level they are able to be, all along the way. at 4, at 6, at 10. your story about the girls and my niece’s situation remind me that i am helping to guide my children by expecting them to be responsible for their choices. great article 🙂
I am glad you see how tranferable the concept is. Yes. You have to start early–or rather it gets harder the older they get.
Glad you liked it.
Always a pleasure to read & learn from your stories on the front lines of an empowered educational model. I often think about the trickle down effect of parenting, how issues that don’t serve us in life, then as children & now as adults, would be a great place to start in educating a whole child rather than by incident. A genius is a sum of its parts.
Amanda,
Thank you for your thoughts. It is interesting to observe the effect we have on children.
Many years ago, after the funeral of one of my favorite uncles, I was confessing to my cousin how badly I thought I had messed up my children. She said, “Oh, Ricky, don’t you know we all mess up our children? We can’t help it. It’s been set up that way.” She was right, of course. Each human being has strengths and weaknesses and for all the blessings we pass on to our children, there are always some curses that we just couldn’t help but pass on.
Thank you for this poignant story. It speaks volumes to the impact parents AND school personnel have on children.
Thank you for your comment.; Glad you liked it.
Thank you, Rick, for being an educator who is committed to educating for life. Your students and their parents are very fortunate to have you on their side.
Nice to be working in the same vinyard with you.
Rick, I can identify with this story and only WISH you were present at my 12-going-on-13 year old daughter’s school. If anything, I bristle at what is being taught (waaay too much sex education for her age, for instance), and at the mixed messages that are being instilled in her. When we discuss personal responsibility and rules, she complains that we are strict and that the other students’ parents ‘don’t care what they do!’ I’d think this wasn’t true and was just pre-teen exaggeration if I hadn’t seen the other kids and how wild and ill-behaved they are. The teachers seem loathe to discipline, especially if the parents aren’t going to back it up. 🙁
I see my job as helping my amazing daughter navigate this sea of confusing and conflicting input with strength and growing wisdom, and helping her enjoy her teenage years without succumbing to the standard pitfalls (drugs, pregnancy, car accidents, etc.). It’s TOUGH, especially since I want her not to make the same mistakes I made…of course I know it’s HER path to walk, but when she gets lippy and disrespectful, I worry that I will not be able to have a positive influence on her when she really needs it.
All this to say, THANK YOU Rick for doing what you do, and sharing your wisdom here. I deeply appreciate it, and take strength and wisdom from it myself, which hopefully will translate into a happy, healthy and well-rounded child!
This is a powerful story. And the comments are also great to read. I too struggle with this with my 5-year-old. How do I help her understand that first we don’t do the bad action, second, we don’t condone it or laugh at it, and third, we try to stop or mitigate it. Probably I want to much from her but we work on it.
I was struck by Shauna’s remark about her child saying that, “other kids parents don’t care what they do!” When I was a young teacher a more experienced teacher told me that there was only one reply to that, “They may not care, but I care greatly. About you and the situation.”
Words to live by and a powerful story. A good day all around.
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Aug 16, 2011, 12:16 PM EDT | Updated Dec 6, 2017
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