Now It's a Pencil?

When I was in grade school, at recess boys and girls used to regularly gather around children from a less fortunate family and taunt and chase them. The teachers assigned to the yard duty consistently ignored the chanting group of children circling around four other kids. The humiliated kids used to pretend to go along, but you could see the pain in their faces. Sometimes I would go stand with them so more people would be on their side, but I didn't yet know how to tell others. Since the adults on the playground weren't interested, the unspoken lesson to me was that sometimes kids had to handle things on their own and that some things we just didn't talk about. The entire school just looked the other way.

Fast forward. Today we call this bullying and so much attention is given to the slightest infraction that stories repeatedly hit cable news. Seminars are given and Lifetime movies are made all telling us how bad it is to bully anyone for who they are. The kids in my school were merely poor. Imagine the movie that could have been made if they were of another ethnicity or gay?

Our North American school culture is on red alert lest someone be offended in any manner. We must protect everyone from everything every minute. And if we can't prevent it, we'd better jump all over it once it dares to happen!

A few years ago we heard about the "sexual harassment" when a kindergartener innocently kissed a little girl on the cheek.  Christmas Break is now retitled to cover up that reality. Entire states embrace curriculum embracing any kind of sexuality and any number of mommies and daddies.  Words the founding fathers used and commandments they posted as a matter of course are now deemed offensive and are being systematically removed from public buildings everywhere. Even the American flag - our country's flag - bothers some citizens! Oh, don't forget that it isn't fair to speak only English. (These same people don't blink when they go to France and everyone there speaks...French.)

Now we have a second grade boy playing "Marine and bad guy"  with his buddy at recess. His buddy was the bad guy and he was the Marine, cuz that's what his dad was. He used his pencil to fire "boom" and get the bad guy. The result for this natural child play was a two-day suspension for each boy. Never mind that they stopped immediately when their teacher told them to. Guns make children afraid and other children might be offended. They should never have done this.

Since this made the national news I imagine different legal groups or even the ACLU are getting involved. All over something normal children would do. Initially I wasn't going to give my girl so much as a squirt gun, but when she made them out of sticks and Legos, I realized it was part of play that I couldn't stop.

Kids play "good" and "bad" guy, and I'm thankful they can even think in terms of good and evil with all of the political correctness watering down reality every time I turn around. Gotta go. I'm off to buy a case of pencils and donate it to the local elementary school.

Thinking Ahead

When I was in high school, the state I lived in legally allowed you to drink at the age of 18. Even though I was several years younger than my peers, I attended parties in their homes. Sometimes the parents were there, sometimes they weren't. Sometimes the parents even bought the keg. I am certain I was not the only illegal drinker. There were other things going on in back rooms or outside. I naively stayed near the largest group of people inside. I had read novels, so I could guess what was being smoked or otherwise inbibed.

I didn't go to that many parties, but one surely stands out in my memory. Two boys from one of my classes were really, really out of it. One of them I suspected accurately as having taken some illegal substances combined with booze and was really whacked. Slurring and stumbling, he decided that he just wanted to lay down and sleep. Alarmed, I forced him to go outside and walked him around the large yard. He was hard to hold up and was furiously insisting he just needed to sleep. I figured if he passed out he'd never wake up. So we kept limping around the yard til the other buddy relieved me and at my insistence, kept walking him around. At school on Monday, the first guy somberly thanked me for saving his life. I do not recall any adults noticing any of this.

My parents never knew about this incident, and had not prepared me for what to do. Even though I didn't know God at the time, he knew me and was acting in my life. And I just remembered there were times when people should not go to sleep.

The other day I heard that the three boys who raped an unconscious 15-year-old girl last fall at a party were finally arrested. It seems that there was a co-ed slumber party and sweet Audrie drank until she passed out. Then three different boys each took a turn with her while other classmates looked on and took pictures. Audrie did not know what had happened until she saw the pictures online a few days later. Her friends had turned against her and she believed her life was ruined. Within the week she had hanged herself. Ever since then, her parents have been putting the pieces together trying to learn why their bright, beautiful, loving girl with her whole life ahead of her would suddenly take her life. The arrests are a huge step in some form of justice. Her parents want her name and picture public so that others can see and learn and stop another such horror.

I cannot fathom the behavior in that room - from the boys commiting such acts with no conscience - to the audience so intrigued they felt justified to capture this depravity for more to see. If these acts would have had an odor, it would have been so dank and insidious the entire street would have needed to be evacuated. In my mind they all go to jail. The onlookers might not have touched Audrie, but to watch and do nothing is criminal. They could have stopped what the boys were doing! But no, being part of a crowd watching and enjoying the torture of another human being was more important at the time.

And... What parent hosts a slumber party for both sexes? What parent lets their child attend such a party? We don't know what Audrie's parents knew. But you have to think at the very least the host home knew a number of people were there. The media will probably never fill us in on this part of the story because the rest of the story is so sensational.

Forgetting the parents for a minute, what has become of people who will watch a horror, treating another human as a disposable commodity of no value? People who will keep their mouths shut out of self preservation?

One of the hallmarks of maturity is the ability to move from concrete to abstract thinking. By the time our teens hit the age of 18, we hope they can navigate life in a balanced manner. Part of getting them there is to teach them to think ahead about what they might do in unexpected circumstances.

My parents did not prepare me ahead of time for the situations that required more wisdom than I possessed. It would have helped even more. I began to prepare my kids once they were about 4 to be stranger-wary. We even practiced what to say if someone said they had a puppy in the car or they had a little child their age. Next came what to do if they were at a friend's house and the dad's gun was brought out or an unacceptable video game or video was shown. By 13, we added details about alchohol, prescription drugs and sexual actions. In addition, we hit the whole "crowd mentality" thing pretty hard. We wanted our kids to think ahead and devise a plan so that if the unforeseen happened, they had an idea of what they would do. Rather than have them overcome with bewilderment or fear, we wanted them to have some sort of predetermined opinion along with an escape plan.

Both of our kids were very uncomfortable with these later discussions and I can be very graphic. I wanted them alive and safe more than anything and I think some of the imagery helped warn them. They knew they could make us the "baddest guys" ever in order to get out of any situation. We always told them they could call at any time, and we would come and get them no questions asked til morning.

I have never come even close to what Audrie's parents have experienced, although in my years of coaching parents have heard some scary stories - but the kids lived. My heart breaks for any parent who walks through such horrors on any level because if the child lives, a part of them has died. And if they die, a part of the parents dies with them.

This is a wake up cry to teach the next generation what it means to have a moral compass and what that looks like in every situation. We can't pick and choose as if life is some de-personalized video game or we will stand for nothing. And then we'll be just like those empty teens in the room that horrible night. Doing nothing.

Mean Girls

Any mother of a girl knows how terrible one can be to another. The sad thing is, how young this junk begins!

When my girl was in second grade I bought her a cute little purse that she could wear over her shoulder. She was delighted with her surprise and wore it to school the next day. After a few weeks, I noticed that her beloved purse remained slung over the back of her chair in her bedroom, untouched.

When a few more weeks passed and her purse gathered dust, I asked her about it. She tried to shrug it off by "not knowing why", but I pressed. As it turns out, some mean girls at school came up to my girl (who was also new at that school) and teased her about her purse. Her response was to love it because she did really like it and it was from her mother, but keep it at home.

I asked her if she truly liked that purse. Yes, she assured me, she really did. Then I asked her why what she liked could change based on who asked her questions. That's when she paused. We talked about how it is okay for us to like things even when friends or others do not. We had a great chat about how it is okay not to match others and like what we like, not to mention shrug off being mocked.

A year later, we had moved states and she was once again a new kid. Two socially important snots strolled up to her at recess and began to tell her they didn't think the way she dressed was cool. My beloved third grade daughter looked these controllers in the eyes and said, "Well, that's fine, because I didn't dress for you, I dressed for me." Yep, she walked away, and yep again these terrors even tried to befriend my girl. This time, she had more preparation. She even came home and told me word-for-word what took place. Oh, did I ever affirm her!

Boys are a different "mean", and I will write more about that later, but for this blog it will suffice to say that when we moved with our second grade son across country, the mean boys in the new neighborhood hung his bike in a tree for starters.

I have told both of my kids that I would rather have someone be mean to them, rather than them be mean and harm anyone else -- ever. My son gasped and asked, "You WANT people to be MEAN to ME??" Nooooo, I replied...never.

Each of my kids has been taught that we do not want to EVER leave a mark on another person, especially emotionally. If someone even tries to hurt my kids, we have the faith and the framework to pray through the attempt. And that we have. We do not want to be the cause of someone else's short term or life long pain - ever.

As a fierce Mommie, I even called a parent of an older after-school daycare kid who told my girl she "sucked". She was just in 2nd grade. I shared this with the mother - that their child had introduced ours to a word we had carefully blocked. Now this was etched on her soul forever. She promptly hung up on me. I changed my work schedule so there was no more exposure to that afternoon well-known daycare. For anyone who knows me, the fact that I woke up at 5:00 a.m. speaks volumes.

I post these illustrations to encourage parents to double-check in with their kids. We all want to fall asleep at night believing our kids are wonderful. Let's be sure we know the whole scoop.

Find out if someone is hurting them emotionally, verbally or physically. Ask those careful and leading questions to learn the story.

Find out if your child is the mean one. Ask those careful and leading questions and do not be afraid to find out that you might have the mean kid. The sooner this is addressed, the shorter the pain for any other child including your own. And, if you find out to your disappointment that you have the mean kid take the time to find out why they are acting out and appear to enjoy hurting others. There is something else going on that needs attention.