Bullied boy commits suicide

Here's an article CNN put out this week about an 11 year old Georgia boy who committed suicide because he was being bullied at school. Very troubling. The boy was originally from the Virgin Islands and other school children were using that fact to taunt him with sexually related language. The article also alludes to a similar case only a month ago in Massachusetts where a boy killed himself after being harassed in school and being called "gay".

The boy in the story had complained about the situation to his mother, who in turn complained about the situation to the school. And what did the school do? They hired a "specially trained liaison" and asked students to sign a "no-bullying pledge".

A "no-bullying pledge???" That's just about one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of. It is as if the school is saying: "Well, the kids signed a contract vowing not to bully. I don't see how they can possibly bully after signed a contract like that. What else can we do?"

So, after a long time of this the boy concluded that nobody could or would help him. One day he came home from school happier than normal and went up to his room where he hung himself. I've heard of that before. That depressed people, once they actually decide to kill themselves, will appear happy and content just before doing so. I've never heard of that happening with children, though. In the end the boy must have decided that he had no other choice.

On warm days I take the kids to the park. We do this all summer long. You know what we see? All around us are parents and kids. The kids are playing. The parents are either playing with the kids, standing around talking with each other or reading magazines or whatnot. But, each parent is always keeping one eye on their child. When we see a child misbehaving we jump in, reprimand them, correct the behavior and then send them back into the social fray to try again. Then we keep doing that until the situation is resolved. If it doesn't get resolved we take our kid home and get them out of there.

I've even had other parents come to me and say: "sorry to bother you, but your kid is playing a bit rough." Then I thank them for letting me know and I go correct the problem. Yesterday I did the same thing when another little boy was playing too rough with Simon.

The other day at the mall a boy was playing to rough with Gwen and she complained to me. I didn't know who's kid it was so I just said loudly: "Gwen if that boy in the yellow shirt is being mean you should just stay away from him." 3 seconds later another dad ran over to have a serious talk with his son.

The point is, none of us are holding "sensitivity training" or asking our kids to sign a "pledge" not to behave poorly. What we're doing is monitoring our children's behavior. When they misbehave we jump in to reprimand and correct the behavior before things get out of hand and remove them if it does.

It seems to me that schools are unable to do this. In schools it is nobody's job to teach children how to behave in social situations. Perhaps this is because, in schools, students so outnumber teachers and other staff that it is impossible to provide the kind of one on one attention I described above.

In any case, students are largely left on their own to create their own social dynamics with their own rules and their own power struggles. And, if social problems arise, kids learn that adults are powerless to help them. Adults are not part of the reality of a student's social life. Instead they are observers who stand outside the social arena, ignorant of its dynamics and impotent to affect it.

Think of it like this: if you had a puppy you wanted to train to be a mature, gentle, responsible adult dog, the last thing you would do is to lock it in a room with other untrained puppies. In that situation you would never expect the puppy to learn the skills you wanted it to learn. And, if the puppy left the room and had bite marks all over it, what would you do? Wring your hangs and ask why these puppies can't learn to get along better?

But, that's essentially what we do with kids in school. We expect other immature kids to teach our kid "socialization." After all, who in a public school is responsible for the social maturity of your child? Nobody. There is no adult in any school who is responsible for the mature social growth of children. And yet we expect them to become "socialized" by sending them to school.

And then, when schools do not do this properly and also fail to properly educate the children, some even suggest sending children to schools for longer each day, more days per week and more weeks per year. The end result is that children spend less and less time with those who are responsible for their social development (their family) and more time with their peers until the peer group replaces the family as the group the student really identifies as "belonging" to.

The only solution I can think of to solve problems like this is to have much smaller schools, with much greater teacher to student ratios. And, it would seem like a good idea to have a bunch of volunteer parents stationed around the cafeteria and playground to monitor and correct social problems as they arise. But, realistically, this is very unlikely. Such changes would be both prohibitively expensive and would take parents away from work.

But, if the best you can think of is to hire a "liaison" or have the kids sign an anti-bullying "pledge", then all you're really doing is reinforcing the lesson that these kids are learning while being bulled: that adults are incapable of helping them when they are in trouble, and if they are unable to solve the problem themselves then they are totally screwed.

In fact, if your school's plan to battle bullying is similar to that described above (sensitivity training and written contracts), isn't that really a sign that the schools are just covering their own asses and they really have no idea how to solve the problem? And if that's the case, then it is true that children really do have no one to turn to if they are being terrorized by other children in school.

In this environment suicide, while horribly tragic, seems almost rational.