We’re forgetting one really important thing in this whole “anti-bullying” craze. The focus has been on the kids who are bullied and the parents of the kids who are bullied (sometimes only after that parent has lost their child to suicide).
Why aren’t we enforcing good parenting? Why isn’t there a focus on the fact that people aren’t raising decent human beings? Telling a kid “it gets better” sends the message that for now, just deal with it. Find good friends, talk to your parents, it’ll stop soon. And we create these “anti-bullying taskforces” in schools and create sentimental promo videos geared towards victims of bullying. And that’s all well and good, because they need encouragement. I was bullied, and it’s tough if you don’t have the right support system.
But a bigger problem of this growing trend of cyberbulling is that at the core of their lives, in their homes, kids aren’t being taught how to be good people. Now a days, if a kid gets in trouble at school, the parent shows up and curses at the teacher! Defending the kid, justifying their bad behavior. Sure they may get their cell phones taken away for a day or two, but the seed has been planted. They watch their parents bully other adults all day–yelling at teachers, cursing out other drivers, cursing out fast food workers. Nobody makes time to raise good kids anymore, therefore we’re breeding a generation of entitled, mean people. So what do we do? We try to patch up a problem instead of fixing it from where it began.
My parents have always taught me to be patient with people, to respect others differences, to treat people the way I want to be treated. It’s shocking how little that lesson is being taught these days. So yeah, maybe all there is left to do now is console those kids who are victimized by bullying. The world is too big now I guess, and common decency is too rare.
Janelle Collins 