Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006...1:08 pm
My Kid Needs A Wedgie
People have talked about how homeschooled children are too sheltered and need to be “properly socialized”. The image that pops into my head when people say stuff like that is of this cartoon I saw on a homeschooling t-shirt which has three kids standing a bus stop waiting to go to school.
One of the kids has a gang t-shirt on, another one is smoking and drinking, and the last one obviously is pregnant. When people say stuff about how kids need to be socialized in school, I get this mental image and it almost makes me feel like laughing.
Why is it necessary for my child to be bullied in the locker room or to feel pressured to only eat bird-sizes portions of food at lunch? I don’t understand how these experiences translate into later-life success. But some people have gone so far as to say kids NEED these experiences, as if they need to practice handling it for some later situation in life.
How many people have been given a wedgie by their banker? Or had to hand over their grocery money to the bully waiting in the store parking lot? How often does your co-worker say, “Hey, let’s skip work today and go get high. Then tomorrow we can give lock that dweeb from human resources in the supply closet.”
It’s not like the kids who go through this stuff actually come out ahead or learn to be tough. Most anyone who talks about school, especially high school, remembers this sort of stuff negatively and I have yet to hear from anyone who can point out how it was actually beneficial.
We’ve been accused of sheltering our kids, but truthfully, that argument doesn’t make a bit of sense to me. If anything it makes me wonder what pieces of wisdom people think kids actually glean from these situations and why more people aren’t concerned with the fact that kids even go through this stuff in the first place.
Although many people think kids must be “toughed up” and that they gain life skills by going through these adverse situations which will help them survive in the adult world beyond school, there is an article in Science Daily which points to evidence that this type of socialization actually produces the opposite effect:
People who have suffered life’s hard knocks while growing up tend to be more gullible than those who have been more sheltered, startling new findings from the University of Leicester reveal.
The study found that while some people may indeed become more ‘hard-nosed’ through adversity, the majority become less trusting of their own judgement.
People who have experienced an adverse childhood and adolescence [which includes school bullying] are more likely to come to believe information that isn’t true- in short they are more suggestible, and easily mislead which may in turn impact upon their future life choices; they might succumb to peer pressure more readily.
The original application of this research was the police interrogation setting, the implications being that people who’ve experienced a high number of life adversities may be more prone to falsely confessing due to being highly suggestible, possibly resulting in a greater chance of being wrongly convicted.
Tell me again, why are people so concerned with parents who want to shelter their young children from bullies and other negative childhood experiences?
12 Comments
August 23rd, 2006 at 2:15 pm
You’re right, of course. But folks aren’t really thinking when they say these things. They are often a defensive reaction because they want external validation that they are not doing anything wrong by sending their kids to school. And on balance they might not be. Not all kids are bullied. And more and more schools are taking bullying seriously and trying to deal with it (not always effectively but at least the discourse is starting to change to one in which it is condemned). And there are plenty of opportunities for your kids to get bullied in the playground or whatever and opportunities to instruct them in why that is wrong and why they shouldn’t do it. Not to mention that some kids get bullied by their siblings.
But I laughed at your example about skipping work to get high and then locking the HR guy in the supply closet because I bet there are a few people who have suggested that. And there are plenty of us who have wanted to lock the HR person in the supply closet even though we wouldn’t actually do it. Just made me laugh.
August 23rd, 2006 at 4:20 pm
LOL! I’ve had a couple of co-workers, and even a boss or two, that I would have happily locked away for a couple days. I agree that schools seem to be taking these issues more seriously. although it has been going on for so very long that I don’t really feel like patting them on the back for their efforts.
And yes, children certainly can be bullied at the playground, or the library, or a neighbor’s birthday party. It does happen, which is yet another argument that my kids don’t need to go to school to experience these things, since bullying is readily accessible down at the corner park.
I realize that most people who say stuff about sheltering and socialization are just trying to justify their own choices, but it sounds ridiculous all the same. And then there are the people who make these comments and they don’t even have children. Maybe they should be locked in the closet for a while to think about it.
August 23rd, 2006 at 4:34 pm
As someone who suffered a lot of being made fun of as a child, I certainly can attest to the fact that it did me no good. It just made me feel horrible. I think some people might simply mean that some children who are home schooled (and some who go to very small, private schools) need to learn how to negotiate difficult social situations and learn from experience about what it is like to not live in a very friendly, supportive world at all moments. I have some family who home school their children and when I was in high school, I went to church with some students who went to a small private Christian school and in both of these instances the kids are/were problematically sheltered. That is a long way of saying “of course kids don’t need to be made fun of to develop well, but they DO need plenty of authentic interaction with kids their own age where an adult doesn’t jump in right away to solve problems or restrict the interaction too much.” Great blog, by the way
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:17 pm
In the instance of the children who came from the small Christian school I wonder if perhaps they were sheltered from many aspects of life, and it had less to do with being absent from the school system than it did with their parent’s worldview.
I’ve found this to be the case with adults and children I’ve known who were raised in a cloistered environment, most of them were raised in by parents who sheltered them from anything deemed un-Christian. And when they left the boundaries of their exclusive school or their parent’s house, it was a very big shock for them once they stepped out into the world.
Along those lines, even ME, the one who rolls her eyes at arguments that homeschooling shelters kids, will admit that it seems some religious homeschoolers adopt a level of intentional sheltering which I am very uncomfortable with. In certain instances I feel it can be taken too far.
August 23rd, 2006 at 6:29 pm
Um, could you maybe lock up the guy from accounting instead? We HR people are bullied way too much.
I totally get your point. My sister tells me this stuff all the time. I think there actually ARE some good social aspects of school, but we hear far too much about the bad stuff. It’s like when people have a happy experience at a store/hotel/restaurant, not a word is said, but a bad experience brings all sorts of “feedback.”
August 23rd, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Oh I forgot to mention, if you are going to the conference, I’d be happy to give your kid a wedgie!
August 23rd, 2006 at 7:50 pm
June, I would love it if you could assist with that, because we’ve really been lacking in wedgies around here. In fact, the general underwear play just hasn’t been up to par lately. But unfortunately, we aren’t going to make it to the conference. Instead of rubbing elbows with fellow homeschoolers we’ll be meeting with contractors and working up a sweat in a hot, dusty old house. Wanna trade?
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:04 pm
Oh my no thanks!! I’ve done my penance. I’ve had my share of Friday night “dates” at Home Depot. It took us 12 years, but we are finally living in the house we fixed (we’ve been a full year with no renovations — woo hoo!!). Oh no! Does that mean it is time to move????
September 8th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
That was very well expressed. My own sister refuses to baby-proof her house because she thinks her kids need to learn to sharpen their survival instincts. I cringe every time my little nephew crawls near the top of the stairs.
I completely agree that kids need all the time, love and attention that we can afford to give them!
September 30th, 2006 at 7:35 am
This article expresses so much of how I feel about mistreatment of children, no matter who inflicts it. Being ganged up on and humiliated routinely (or even once!) does not teach children anything. And when it happens routinely one is led to believe that “so many over a prolonged/sustained period of time can’t be wrong”, and that they are the cause of what is happening to them.
The term “sheltering” is often thought of as synonymous with “isolating”. Naturally, such an idea is also not ideal. But sheltering and protecting our children is our job as parents. That does not mean children will never suffer disappointment or problems, but it does mean we are there to facilitate, encourage, and sort out when such events may occur. Life isn’t perfect and it’s important to equip our children with the tools to deal with all the variables. “Sheltering” is not a bad word. “Sheltering” is part of what keeps home a safe place.
As a survivor of the “standard” wedgies, skirt being lifted up and looked under (one of the reasons I *begged* my foster mother to not make me wear dresses to school and wear jeans), gum in hair, humiliation, kick-me signs, name calling, labelling, gossip, and just garden-variety “being picked on”, I can say that constantly being in such an environment, with barely a minute to come up for air, day after day did nothing to build character. I learned after leaving school that people don’t do that to each other every day, nor are they expected to. I was unprepared for how the “real world” was, and often pleasantly surprised. It also took me many years to get over it.
The only thing it did do, in an ironic, twisted way, is raise my standards for how I expect my children to treat each other, and what my threshold is for treatment of myself. But this should be taught and modeled throughout life without the “how not to” example that many children (more than admit it) undergo.
My ideals are Utopian and I am only one person, but I can plant seeds.
October 25th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
Exactly…SCHOOL KIDS DO NOT KNOW A THING ABOUT BUILDING HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS. Public school is the worst possible socialization…they have never been taught any people skills and do not know how to interact with others and now that there is no discipling they make up their own rules and many younger ones suffer from it. I learned about the birds and bees on the school bus in 6th grade because there were senior highers doing it on the bus!! As well as doing drugs on the bus!! What great socialization eh??
January 26th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Speaking of what kids “experience” in high school, and in lower levels as well… I was frequently offered drugs in school, mostly DURING classes (I always refused because I could see the effects they REALLY had on the people taking them), offered cigarettes (I started smoking in HS, kicked it for good finally in 10/05! WOO HOO!), twice I drank alcohol before school, there was one girl who used abortion as birth control… Later she had 2 ectopic pregnancies and was upset because she’ll never have children now. I found no problem in that because she was usually either drunk or high when the “others” were concieved… There were kids that bragged about how they stole stuff. I personally know someone who was dealing drugs in 7th grade, and is still struggling with his “habit”. Kids that bragged when they did “it” in 6th grade!!! I for one, don’t want this kind of “socialization” for my children. My parents obviously had no idea what was going on. Oh, not to mention that, my brother and I were constantly picked/bullied on by the kids at the babysitters, the kids on the bus, and the ones in the class room. Why? No clue. I was very bright for my age, always. I got good grades, except for homework, because I found it redundant and annoying. I had bright blonde hair and blue eyes, very friendly and nice to everyone. Those things made me a very hard, sarcastic person. Kids who were mean to me in school, and bragged about different things, (that I didn’t do which meant I wasn’t “cool enough” for them) now I see them working fast food, retail, and other places, while DH and I own our own businesses. I will make sure that my kids KNOW that SUCCESS is not linked to COOL, and that it comes only with HARD WORK. Nothing will come to them just for asking. They’ll have to work for it, just as I have had to my whole life. My parents worked hard for what we had, and made themselves from nothing. I am doing just the same, and nothing from my school “experience” has prepared me for everyday life, except for me knowing that I cannot trust most people, which actually for me came with real life experience at my first job, Wal-Mart. (and oh, do I have stories to tell… lol) One of the biggest things I’ve seen come out of the School experience, is a blaming of others for one’s own failures in life. My ex-husband was one of those. I’ve seen far too many others doing the same too. Oh, btw just so you know, we lived in the suburbs, not the city. Trash like this is everywhere. Anyways, enough rambling… School is just not “worth it” in my eyes. She (DD) can gain knowledge through my guidance, and everyday life experiences. The End.