A different take on preventing bullying that isn’t based on a law enforcement or punitive after-the-tragic-fact model:
Lately, the issue of bullying has been in the news, sparked by the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a gay college student who was a victim of cyber-bullying, and by a widely circulated New York Times article that focused on “mean girl” bullying in kindergarten. The federal government has identified bullying as a national problem. In August, it organized the first-ever “Bullying Prevention Summit,” and it is now rolling out an anti-bullying campaign aimed at 5- to 8-year old children. This past month the Department of Education released a guidance letter to schools, colleges and universities to take bullying seriously, or face potential legal consequences.
Here’s how it works: Roots arranges monthly class visits by a mother and her baby (who must be between two and four months old at the beginning of the school year). Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits – a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them. “It’s a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others,” explains Gordon. “It carries over to the rest of class.”
Roots of Empathy was founded in 1996 by Mary Gordon, an educator who had built Canada’s largest network of school-based parenting and family-literacy centers after having worked with neglectful and abusive parents. Gordon had found many of them to be lacking in empathy for their children. They hadn’t developed the skill because they hadn’t experienced or witnessed it sufficiently themselves.
Since then, Roots has worked with more than 12,600 classes across Canada, and in recent years, the program has expanded to the Isle of Man, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States, where it currently operates in Seattle. Researchers have found that the program increases kindness and acceptance of others and decreases negative aggression.
“When they talk about protecting kids in schools, they talk about gun shields, cameras, lights, but never about the internal environment. But safe is not about the rules – it’s about how the youngsters feel inside.”
This approach relies on the discredited liberal idea of “empathy”, so I’m not sure it will spread beyond Seattle.
Joseph Nobles
Nice article. However, I think these “victims” should just man up. Life (like politics) is not bean bags, so school shouldn’t be either.
edited
Lit3Bolt
Exactly. What did this baby do to “deserve” empathy from me? I don’t want any freeloading babies expecting free empathy handouts! If that baby wants empathy, it should get a fucking job.
Scuffletuffle
Too many of this country’s citizens have been raised by un-empathetic, non-caring parents for this to have any wide effect, in my opinion.
Kay
@Joseph Nobles:
The babies, too.
They’re whiners, by their very nature, and completely unproductive.
twiffer
i’m having enough trouble trying to teach my son that cannibalism isn’t funny.
once we’ve got that wrapped up, we’ll move on to anti-bullying.
Joseph Nobles
@Kay:
Little poopbaggers, one and all.
Lit3Bolt
This got me thinking if any conservative has reconciled their views on abortion with anchor babies. HA! We all know the answer, just joshin’.
Dennis SGMM
Just this; our autistic son was subject to so much bullying, particularly in Middle School and High School, that he was nearly killed when he once tried to run away rather than go back to school again. What made the situation maddening was that even when I presented school administrators with names, dates and times of the incidents of bullying I was brushed off because “Our kids would never do something like that.”
I finally got him out of there and made the school district provide him with a tutor by threatening to bring suit to compel them to pay for his attendance at a nearby (And very expensive) private school on the grounds that he wasn’t receiving an education that met his needs.
Aaron Fown
Dealing with mental internalities rather than physical externalities may be a philosophically, economically, and psychologically sound way of modifying behavior, but how are we supposed to sell bullet proof vests, metal detectors and pervasive cameras to the schools if everyone is busy being ‘nice’ to each other!
Socialist capitalist-blockers. ;-)
Thruppence
Sounds great, I hope it takes root. I’m visiting Seattle for the first time, and I’m amazed at these little clusters of college-age LaRouche cultists clustering on downtown corners with posters of Barack Hitler protesting “Obama’s Recession.” Have they always been here, or have Tea Party victories given new life to paranoid cranks from under every rock?
Jason In the Peg
@twiffer:
Maybe don’t show your son this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu
Kay
@Dennis SGMM:
I’m so sorry. I don’t think your experience is at all unusual. Recognizing it’s going on is an acknowledgment that something in that school is out of whack, and I think a lot of schools are loathe to admit that.
I have a couple of quibbles with the approach. I don’t know why they focused on low-income schools and neighborhoods. The problem in the US doesn’t seem to be at all exclusive to poor people.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
I’m guessing they were able to get the funding by calling it an “anti-gang” program instead of an anti-bullying program, but that’s just a guess.
MBL
@Kay:
I agree. Her experience is not unusual.
Neither is the experience of many teachers and school administrators who get a phone call from Mommy every time Mommy’s Dearest has someone look at him cross-eyed.
I have had many experiences of bullying in my various classrooms. I have dealt with many of them successfully and have had less success in dealing with others. But for every legitimate example of actual bullying, I’ve had another kid who had his parent wrapped around his finger and constantly whined about bullying that simply wasn’t taking place.
It goes both ways.
twiffer
@Jason In the Peg: i remember when that first came out. alas, it appears the recovering cannibal market just never got behind the idea.
incidently, the major barrier to convincing the wee one that cannibalism isn’t funny is that saying “remember son, cannibalism isn’t funny” is, in fact, rather funny.
Ash Can
@Thruppence: They started popping up like mushrooms in early 2009.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Empathy is an anathema to our way of life. If all these young people started to feel empathy for each other, they might start to feel empathy for other, more foreign people, too. They be reluctant to support multiple, unnecessary wars in middle east! They might not make sure the conditions for illegal immigrant workers were as brutal as possible, while maximizing profit! They might support programs for poor people! The horror!
/wingnut
Svensker
Hope it works and spreads. So many kids have no role models at home either because the parent is absent or doesn’t know how to be a parent. Rich AND poor.
Dennis SGMM
@MBL:
I’m not going to take your comment about “it goes both ways” as applying to my comment.
Here’s how it was; a cop in a nearby town picked up our son when he saw him almost get killed by a semi. He asked my son if he understood that he’d nearly been killed. Our son answered that that would have been okay. He was fifteen at the time.
anticontrarian
The other thing it has going against it is that studies show that it works, making it another fact with a well-documented liberal bias and therefore inherently inferior to faith-based punishment models for behavior modification.
Mnemosyne
@twiffer:
Well, you have to admit, cannibalism is kind of funny, or zombies and zombie comedies wouldn’t be so popular.
The empathy lesson is where you point out that it’s not quite as funny when he’s the one getting eaten, is it?
(We watched Zombieland a couple of weekends ago. It was okay, I guess, but it was no Shaun of the Dead. Having a zombie movie where none of the leads get eaten is cheating.)
Joel
I always thought the pleasure in zombie movies is that it gives moral license for the protagonists to engage in wanton destruction. Basically blasting scores of soulless humanoids without remorse.
aimai
I found that article incredibly uplifting. I also see it as an important corrective to the way the ages are separated out in our schools and families. Basically, as families get smaller and smaller, and life gets busier, the raising of babies and toddlers gets separated from the natural experience of teenagers and (future) new parents. How many people have changed diapers or spent a few hours with babies before they actually have their own?
K through 8 schools in which siblings attend together for years are also very few and far between. They are the norm here, in my city, and it means that you can be sure that if you have siblings a few years older or younger than yourself they are present in school with you. It is supposed to have quite an ameliorating effect on the middle school years since you are either the older sibling, with duties and relations to the kids younger than you, or the younger sibling with someone to look up to.
Also, I really like the emphasis on babies as fun and interacting with babies as a two way learning experience. I hate the modern day focus on “babies as punishment” for sex (exemplified in the Buffy where all the teenagers are given raw eggs to carry around and protect to demonstrate what a drag children are). That whole approach implicitly says that all family relationships are nothing but trouble, all work and no play. In reality, if you want them and enjoy them, babies are absolutely fascinating intellectually and morally. And the same ought to be true of all family relationships. If not, if they seem like work all the time, you are doing them wrong.
aimai
Lost Left Coaster
I would define the overriding cultural problem of the United States as being a lack of empathy. I think that empathy is key to most of the problems that we want to solve. And, frankly, I think that teabaggers are teabaggers because they lack empathy for a large portion of their fellow human beings.
This is a great program.
kay
@Dennis SGMM:
From the article:
I’m so glad your son made it.
kay
@aimai:
hah! I have a lot of siblings, I’m on the younger end, and I loved seeing them in school. I never thought about it as a plus, but of course it is.
Mnemosyne
@Joel:
That’s the pleasure of any post-apocalyptic story — see also Stephen King’s The Stand. Plus you get to drive cars and live in houses that you would never, ever be able to afford.
But good zombie movies point out that these pleasures are fleeting and it’s only a matter of time before you succumb or are devoured, too.
aimai
@kay:
I had an older brother in school with me–and both my daughters shared k-8 for six years–it definitely makes a difference in their experience of school and the school’s experience of them. I liken it to belonging to a “family practice” in medicine instead of using an emergency room. When all your kids see the same doctor there’s a real sense that all the family issues are known and taken into account in treating every illness or developmental issue. When you rush your kid to an emergency room you have to start from scratch, every time. Similarly when you have more than one kid in the same school at the same time the teachers and the kids have a couple of cracks at relating to each other and knowing the entire family. Also, the children see what it means to grow up and go to the older classes and can also look back and understand why the little kids classes are the way they are.
In my current children’s school (and many schools locally) there are “special friends” relationships between the lower grades with fifth graders going back and mentoring third graders, and third graders working with kindergartners. That definitely helps the kids understand that everyone makes mistakes, everyone develops at their own pace, and that the whole movement of life through the school is progressive. I think it cuts down on the tendency of kids to think in very absolute, concrete terms like “this is good or this is bad” or “this is normal and this is not normal” (this kind of absolutist thinking can lead to bullying as kids try to make others conform to some imaginary norm) because they see how change and variation among different kids is, in fact, the reality.
aimai
kay
@aimai:
I work as a court-appointed guardian a lot, so I’m in schools a lot on my rounds, and I’m a big weepy sap, so I look for good things to get all teary about. The elementary school here has the disabled classes integrated with the “average” students at “events” (assemblies and such), and they’re actually kind to each other. I was blown away by that, because we never saw disabled students. They were there, it was a public school, but I don’t know where. I’m a little pissed. I think I would have benefited from some exposure to them. I would have liked to have been given the opportunity, anyway.
Mike G
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Won’t someone please think of the military recruiters? And the authoritarian, punishment- and judgement-oriented churches? And the Republican Party! What will happen to them?
Kyle
@aimai:
Some people never grow out of this, even as adults. They’re called ‘the Republican base’.
Kewalo
I’m old and don’t have any idea what is going on in schools these days. But here in WA we passed an anti-bullying bill years ago. It was pushed by a fat conservative. And here is part of what he said.
It touched me so much that, as you can see, I’ve saved the link.
Larkspur
Lookit: if my local Human Society has been able to devise a program like Pen Pals, in which not-quite-adoptable dogs are sent to selected, trained inmates at San Quentin to be socialized and readied for adoption, then surely we can create programs as described above to awaken and nurture children’s empathy – way long before San Quentin becomes a possibility for a child’s future living quarters.
Children long to care and nurture. (In fact, they have to be pretty well supervised while doing so in case they accidentally hug the kittie or baby chick to death.) I think it’s a fascinating approach to helping children build their consciences.
Hee, Aimai, your Buffy references reminds me of the wonderful transformation of super-jock bully Larry. Xander’s trying to get mean old Larry to admit that he is the werewolf that’s been harassing Sunnydale, but Larry thinks Xander is trying to blackmail him or bully him on account of Larry being closeted and gay. And as soon as Larry says that out loud, what he meant to be an accusation against Xander becomes a life-changing moment for Larry. He’s gay! He’s out! It’s kind of okay. And he doesn’t need to push girls and non-jock boys around any more. Exit one bully.
maus
SOUNDS LIKE SOME QUEER INDOCTRINATION PROGRAM OR SUMPTIN’
No, really, between this and teaching classes early in life on logic, “truth”, objectivity versus subjectivity, we would be an amazing society.
HyperIon
Roots of Empathy got coupled with Seeds of Compassion here in Seattle in 2007 when the Dali Lama came. It was a serious attempt to communicate with lots of parents and kids.
Here’s the point I think most important:
Another version of “Be the change you want to see in the world”.
YellowJournalism
I work with small children, and our philosophy is to focus on the feelings of the victim of a situation rather than the actions/words of the perpetrator. It actually helps to cut down on some of the bullying/fighting/biting because it allows the kids to think of the situation in an empathetic nature. Too bad adult society often falls into the blaming the victim approach to problem solving and justice.
Svensker
@Dennis SGMM:
Oh, God, Dennis. Hope things got better for him. What an awful thing to hear your child say.