I just find the notion of my life being someone's statistic to prove how wrong it is insulting. Logic has place in the world, but we shouldn't reduce everything to numbers. We're not machines. You can call it pride or delusion, I stand by that. Life is not perfect and implying that the world of yesterday was somehow better than the world today is nostalgia talking. This evolution of family is not a bad one, simply different; as the world changes, so must the family dynamic. Our culture enables this evolution. And yes, I am unable to talk rationally about it because of my experience. I also believe that not involving those directly effected by it is counter productive. Edit: I was fortunate. But I will never not defend this belief. My mother deserves better to all the people who bullied her with these statistics.
Sadly true, and often overlooked too. I can't help but find adults who bully and belittle rather pitiable to be honest. But, as I wrote before, that is my only experience with it, I wasn't really bullied at school - I did bully while at school. I'm not proud, and I'm not going to defend myself either.
How else can we discuss the trends of 314,000,000 people? I'm sorry you are insulted, but we have to discuss this from 10,000 feet in the air in order to grasp historical data and tracking. I agree, there is a time and place for logic, and I don't see any reason why this logical discussion can't take place. Once again, you are speaking from the data gathered from ONE PERSON. You have no empirical data to back up your claim. In order to claim that the changing family dynamic is 'positive', you would need to provide data showing a positive trend due to this dynamic. Otherwise, your just running on feelings. Again, there are always exceptions to the data, but the data as a whole cannot be argued. These are not my opinions or feelings, this is fact.
The thing you have to understand about statistics is that they aren't talking about you. It may be that 75% of the people do blah blah blah, but that says absolutely NOTHING about you, personally. If you're insulted by it, that's you, not the statistics. I have this argument often with people who don't understand what statistics are. If I point out that, statistically, people from the Bible Belt are religious, I'm sure some atheist from the Bible Belt is going to say I'm offending him. What can I do but sigh and say I wasn't talking about him, personally? I was just talking about the statistical data. You are not a statistic. You are an individual person and the science of statistics does not apply to individual persons, it only applies to large groups. Stop being insulted by statistical data.
Correlations, especially single-valued correlations, are particularly suspect. Comparing a percentage of single-parent families to a percentage of arrests of single-parent children is a single-valued statistic. Consider the pecentage of law abiding children of single parents, and you may have a very similar percentage, and likewise a percentage single-parent victims of violence. Do you see the problem? Even if there is a correlation, and not coincidence, cause and effect requires considerably more than statistics. In this case, you must begin by asking, "What percent of the population in general are children of single parents?" Then you have to look at the exact definitions. Is a child of a single parent someone who never had two parents? Or at what age did the family become a single parent family? What was the nature of the separation? What was the family's income level? Did either pareny have a criminal background? Was the single parent ever bullied or abused, and if so, to what extent? Statistics won't find the answers. They may be used, with care, to disprove hypotheses. They rarely, if ever, prove a hypothesis.
Your opinion, my opinion, we're just trading here. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. I'm stating my opinion on the matter because I will always defend my stance on this belief. It's one of the few things I will never be silent about. People bullied my mother about these statistics, even my father. Everything that went wrong with me was because -- apparently -- she's a single mother and couldn't do anything right. Even the fact I was bad at math (which probably explains a lot about my opinion, actually). I'm sorry if my feelings offend people and I'm overly defensive about it.
I got this far, decided I would comment on this, and then back off. I won't speak to "academically", but I am curious as to why you list all these statistics on single mothers and then bring up declining morality. As to the stats, of course they don't include the reasons they exist - such as deadbeat dads, lack of health insurance, lack of affordable housing, moralists and their dominance in creating support programs for low-income persons, lack of affordable day care - shall I go on? It's easy to draw erroneous conclusions if the numbers are all one looks at. Just for "truth in advertising" - I was a never-married single mom. I was on welfare a few times while raising my son. He was a straight-A student, went to college (also straight-A), has a great job (promotion after promotion), has a strong sense of responsibility, and is very happy with his lot in life. And now I withdraw from the discussion before I say something I will regret.
Wow. Well, a lot has transpired since I was last able to peruse this thread. We have gotten off on a tangent, though, because there is a lot related to bullying specifically that isn't exactly addressed by the alleged decline of the family and morals, although that does play some part. JJ, when you say I think that you are the one who is letting feelings and emotion take over a bit here, based on the subsequent responses. Your statement, in response to my reply about the background of the statistics you cite (more in a minute) implies that what I said and my position is somehow steeped in pride from, I guess some part of my background, or feelings I have that make me particularly sensitive to the topic of either bullying or single mothers or, perhaps, poverty. I suppose I should disclose my personal background: I grew up in a relatively affluent suburb, in a two-parent family with my younger brother. My parents are still married. The schools I went to were very good. The neighborhood was very safe, and filled with other kids with similar circumstances. I went to college, and then to law school. I have been married for almost 17 years, and my husband and I have two children. We now live in a relatively affluent suburb. My kids go to/will attend pretty good schools in a safe area. Most of the families in our neighborhood have a similar structure to our own. My husband also grew up in a suburb with similar attributes, in a two parent household and his parents are still married. So, I have no particular connection to or need to somehow justify single motherhood or the need to help families that don't make a lot of money in order to feel better about myself or to justify any failure or magnify any achievement. I was neither bullied nor a target of bullying. I have no reason to think that my concern about bullying in schools is in any statistically significant or measurable way any higher than that of any other parent of school-aged children. I think that my interest in the well-being of our children is relatively typical of anyone who has read anything about the issue. So, my only real interest is in dealing with the facts of the situation. I have no reason to believe that the statistics you cited are incorrect. But the issue is that everything is nuanced. And you have to look underneath those statistics to determine what they mean. You have to look at the underlying causes that influence the outcome that you are looking at. You referenced a lot of bad social outcomes that do have some correlation to the factor you are talking about, which seems to be the decline of the family and therefore also the decline of morals in general, the decline of the educational system, and I suppose, worse people. The thing is, you can't just look at those statistics and say, "Aha! It must be the fact that single motherhood in and of itself is causing the higher suicide rates, and other outcomes you cited. Correlation does not mean causality. There may be other factors that influence both factors, which is the case with single motherhood. As I stated earlier, most of the poorer outcomes are tied more to socio-economic status than they are to single motherhood in and of itself. Single parents who are in higher socio-economic groups, have no discernable poorer parenting outcomes than two parent families in the same group. So it is not the single parenthood by itself that is causing these other problems. The fact is that there are a number of economic factors that impact single women more than they impact other groups. Women as a whole still are worse-off economically than they were prior to a divorce. There are still income disparities. And there are still lingering effects of previous discrimination that affect some groups more than others, that lead to higher incidences of single parenthood in some communities. You've got to look at all of the factors influencing these things if you want to seriously think about these issues or to ponder any type of serious solution to them.
That's why this is a think tank. You have a hypothesis, go ahead and throw it out there, but don't say it's true because you had a turkey sandwich for lunch. Back up your claims with valid, credible sources. It's not that hard to understand. My hypothesis is that bullying is a natural product of social relationships and hierarchy. Also, that you can't 'legislate' away something that is part of our genetic instinctual framework.
But the most natural form of conflict resolution involves physical aggression, so aren't you undermining your own thesis when you don't support physical abuse? If people should "deal with" emotional abuse without any aid from those in authority, then doesn't that mean that they should deal with physical abuse as well? Civilization exists, in part, to improve on what's natural. We don't require a kid who is physically overpowered by others to just deal with being beaten up on a regular basis. And we shouldn't require a kid who is emotionally overpowered by others to deal with emotional abuse on a regular basis. The small kid isn't going to respond to being beaten up by somehow growing bigger and more able to fight. The emotionally timid kid isn't going to respond to being tormented by growing extra self-confidence. Kids are developing animals, and need guidance. Providing them with guidance for everything _but_ their social development makes no sense to me. I wouldn't argue that that guidance needs to be of the "zero tolerance" type, but I would argue that bullying behavior should absolutely warrant serious, painful consequences. I'm also not sure that "conflict resolution" is the right term here. Bullies don't generally bully because their victims have done anything to offend them; they bully because they enjoy bullying. It's not a conflict any more than someone working with a punching bag is experiencing a conflict. I also don't think that there's anything new about bullying. I think that it's much more recognized now because of school shootings, but it's always been a part of school life.
Well, shouldn't we be preparing them for life as an adult? So if an adult gets beat up, he calls the police. So teachers are the 'police' of schools. But when you get to be an adult, you deal with demeaning, insulting people all the time and you have to deal with it, right?
ABSOLUTELY true! Bullying has always existed, among children and adults. It's not new, by any estimation. So what is to be done? Do we solve it the way everything these days, by passing more unenforceable and intrusive laws? Shall we convert failed schools into reprogramming centers for the bullies clumsy enough to get caught? Or do we focus on what teach victims of bullying to better cope with the problem, and prevent it from turning into bigger tragedies?
JJ, I would ask you to consider this scenario. You know in what city I live, and you know enough about my hobbies and habits to locate me quite easily. And taking that into consideration, would you come here and bully me? Why not? It is my postulate that the answer lies within the concept of Occam's Razor.
At my office, if someone sang an insulting jingle at someone, or spit on them in the parking lot, or shouted insults or slurs at them, the person who did that would be fired. So I, personally, certainly don't have to deal with the same kind of behavior that a bullied child has to deal with. Some people do. So, yes, children need to learn how to deal with bullies. How is leaving them without protection or guidance going to teach them that? Children will need to drive when they're adults; do we put them all behind the wheel in a big parking lot and award licenses to the ones that survive? No, we teach them. Edited to add: And, sexual harassment is illegal in the US, as are all sorts of bullying behaviors based on race, religion, age, and so on. This is increasingly becoming a world where bullying has consequences, so we should also be teaching the _bullies_ how to handle adulthood.
There was an interview in Slate with the author of the new book on bullying that I had mentioned earlier. I think it has some interesting points. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/02/sticks_and_stones_emily_yoffe_interviews_emily_bazelon_about_her_new_book.html If the link is deleted, you could go to slate's website and search for sticks and stones or Can We Really Stop Bullying, which is the name of the article. Hopefully you'll be able to find it.
What I find pathetic are that majority of the time teachers in school know that bullying is going on! I was a victim, bullied from forth grade until I started high school. I had the classic symptoms, antisocial, lost interest in class, slipping grades, harassment inside and outside the classroom refusal to participate in any activity. Several times I would report to the teachers, talk to them after school and had my parents come in demanding a resolution to the staff, principal and student services. All they could do was tell the student to knock it off and detention. It got worse when my entire classroom and several other students had a snowball fight against me. I ended up with a black eye, bloody nose and several bruises. Funny it was after school and none of the parents who were picking up their kids hardly ever intervened. My entire class was under suspension and had to attend anti-bullying classes and it just made it worse. My parents could not give me advice because they always told me to ignore them. I asked my martial arts instructor if I should have the right to defend myself and was told only if it is a last resort. I had used it once and was able to get a free pass because my martial arts instructor had visited the school when my parents were called in. A couple of students in my class ended up getting thrown out of the martial arts school as well. Honestly it is a childish thing, but I found that it was the adults who did not take appropriate action. All the school could do was make sure that I was not going to get killed and let me move up in the grade system regardless if i failed or not. It was not until high school where I met students from other towns that I was accepted. Though it was a part of my life that made my skin thicker and more durable to the adult bullies. It made me learn to not be afraid to stand up for myself. It is part of our nature, but there is a fine line.
You know you're an oddball when a teacher says, "Well, she would have more friends if she weren't so smart. Tell her to play dumb and they'll stop picking on her." I kid you not, this was a comment from one of my elementary school teachers to my mother. It was also one of the few times I have ever seen my mom at a loss for words. I don't think I have ever seen her quite so angry about anything, before or since. I've always been okay with who I am, faults and all. I know there are a lot of people, who have been bullied who can't say that. I gained a thick skin and a quick tongue very soon after starting school. Being introverted also came to my aid...I was comfortable inside my own head. I think that was key for getting me through the nightmare that is public education. It might sound weird, but I don't know if I would know myself as well as I do if I hadn't been bullied. Experiences shape who and what we are, and bullies were a very large part of my experience that I learned to ignore.
AMEN DARKKIN. God I hate it when teachers act all "lalalalalala if that were my kid well that is not my kid but lalalalala" If I were a public school teacher and saw students bullying a kid, regardless I would discipline them by embarrassing them in the middle of the class. I would make them admit they were bullying such and such student because of these reasons and make them write a letter to their parents about what they are doing. I would not call it psychologically damaging. What a bully hates more is to be put in their place and they shall be put there. Obviously I would not make them wear a sign around their neck and walk around school. But teachers are suppose to be authoritative and if a student is potentially in danger (Which I say bullying is one of them), the teacher should have the write to psychological disciplinary action. And I ended up having no friends. One of the girls who hated me and was in my girl scout troop stood up and said "Nobody likes you because you dress like a slob, you do not like such and such things and you are weird" They did not know that my family did not have much money to spend on buying me nice things unless I REALLY needed it and most of my clothes I wore up until I had a job was all hand me downs from my neighbors, mother and cousins. Plus I had problems understanding because of my hearing problems and comprehension.
I wasn't bullied as harshly as some, but in elementary school I was picked on for being the happy smiling girl. I was nice to all (though I admit, naive) so I was thought of as an easy target to sway. The whole let's be BFFs if you do this for me. This gave me a rough couple of years, trying so hard to get people to 'like' me and hurting my self-esteem. Even in my recent teen years, girls can just be plain mean and hurtful. And still they choose to pick on 'happiness'...ugh. During a get together with close friends last year, one of those friends invited a girl I didn't know and she cussed out my fifteen year old sister for being 'too' happy. I mean, come on! Though I thought that time would never pass (months and months of trying to avoid that girl), it did. Everything is temporary, even current situations you think aren't going to end anytime soon.
There will always be bullys (bullies, SP?) and there will always be victims. But there can always be resolve. The problem is that 'resolve' in not likely in modern society, and will probably draw as much criticism from apologists as the bullying itself. The teachers are going to parrot what elitists think the perfect society should be (but isn't), the bullys will still bully, and the victims will not fight back. Ten years from now a new bullying thread will start here. BTW, I was never bullied in high school. By then the issue had been settled. Oh, there was talk, but never action. And I didn't have to go to a school principal or my parents or an attorney to achieve that. Sometimes simpler is better. Do I advocate that now? Of course I do! The adults aren't going to do anything, so why live in fear so you can look 'evolved'? Until this stops you live in a jungle.
