It’s those couple of words a parent always dreads to hear, but they came out of my seven-year-old daughter’s mouth for the first time the other day. No it wasn’t profanity, but it still had the same effect.
“I don’t want to go to school.”
Those few words can send so many triggers to a parent’s brain, evoking first the question, “why?”, and then the reasons before you even ask the child.
Those thoughts go from the selfish, i.e., how am I going to motivate this little person to think otherwise, so I can get to work on time? The other is a more panic-induced one: Is my child scared to go to school?
It’s the latter that many parents and children have experienced, being scared to go to school because something is not right. And often the culprit is that age-old problem of bullying.
For the record, the reason my child didn’t want to go to school was simply due to malaise. She even tried to pull the old “I’m sick-to-my-stomach trick,” running to the bathroom, and returning a few seconds later, saying she threw up. Little did she know I was the master of that same ploy back in my youth.
However, unlike her, I had some real reasons not to want to go to school.
I am a confessed former bully, who has been on both sides of the fence.
My experience as a bully and victim of bullying started with a misunderstanding. In Grade 6, I had heard that a friend’s younger sister had been hit in the face with a skipping rope. The girl accused of wielding the rope was a socially awkward Grade 5 student, who may have had some special needs.
I ganged up on her, and made threats. I’ll never forget her face, streamed with tears.
However, while that was happening, some older kids from the nearby middle school came to her defence. And then they set their sights on me when I started Grade 7 at the same middle school.
I spent a year being taunted, pushed around, and whispered about by a gang of Grade 8 kids until some of my friends had enough and told the school’s principal about what was going on.
My reasoning for not telling an adult about being bullied was that I deserved it in some sort of way.
The cycle would repeat itself in high school, but by then I had protected myself by hanging out with the mohawked, trench-coat crowd, nobody really bugged me. And eventually I climbed my way out and got even –– I joined the yearbook staff.
Get on my bad side, and I could publish the ugliest picture of you for all your peers to see, forever… (Now who had become the bully?)
The lesson in all this: bullying begets bullying. It’s not right, but sometimes it comes from an unexplained place, where a little communication could go a long way.
With the addition of cyber bullying, the problem is so much more complex now, it goes way beyond jocks throwing slushes into the faces of glee club members, or name calling.
As a reporter, I have spoken to young people, some of them extremely talented, but socially awkward, who have experienced bullying by their peers on the school bus, in the schoolyard, even in their neighborhoods.
One even told me he was locked in a room at school and left there screaming before someone let him out.
Let’s just say he is no longer enrolled in school, but he has made quite the name for himself as a musician, and so his past problems haven’t defined who he is.
And I know a few former bullies who are now caring and loving (Ahem). Things do change.
So the day you hear that your kid doesn’t want to go school, don’t panic, but ask questions, and get help if you don’t like the answer.
It may not go away right then and there, but it won’t last forever.
—Kristin Froneman is the entertainment editor for The Morning Star
