The Secret School Life of Adolescents, Part 2

And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence
by James Garbarino, Ph.D., Ellen deLara, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

To get into the library, Nathan had to first get through a series of taunts about being a nerd, then get past a volley of objects being thrown at him. Nathan was an athlete; he was capable and strong on the field. But he was not "strong enough" to deal with the ridicule and bullying of his peers, so Nathan stopped using the library. The culture that degraded him for trying to do his best infiltrated the rest of his high school experience. Though he was quite bright, Nathan's low grades reflected this poisoning of his social experience at school.

Where were the teachers, staff, and other administrators when Nathan was facing this emotional abuse? Why was this group of bullies allowed to prevail, making each student run an emotional gauntlet before reaching the inner sanctum of the library? The answer is that Nathan attended a very large high school, and the staff at this school did not consider hallway supervision as part of their "professional role."

In their work about school safety, Ron Avi Astor, Heather Meyer, and William Behre while at the University of Michigan focused on the ways in which schools have many "unowned spaces" — places that are not supervised by adults or occupied by positive, community-minded students. Students are all aware of where the dangerous places are in the building and on the campus, and some take advantage of these opportunities to bully others. Children are particularly vulnerable in the hallways.

Most kids will bear up under this kind of emotional violence. But some children who are not as resilient will experience psychological damage. The damage can include (but is not limited to) shame, lessened self-esteem, impaired self-image, and learned helplessness. The basic components of learned helplessness are the beliefs that one has no control over what is happening, that a bad event will continue to recur, and that nothing can effectively happen to change the situation. As a result of these damaging perceptions, kids begin to make important choices that hurt them academically and socially, perhaps in ways that affect the rest of their lives.

As we see in the case of Nathan, kids who are ridiculed by peers for their attempts academically may begin to make choices that result in lower grades or reduced academic interest. Kids who are degraded by their peers can end up with shaky self-confidence, damaged self-image and self-esteem. It is not easy to buck the culture of your peers if you are being tormented for being different.

As adults, sometimes we tend to think, "Students, especially teenagers, should stand up for themselves. They need to fight for what is important to them." While that sentiment has some merit, we must always be humble about matters like this. How difficult is it for adults to stand up or to stand out? On some job sites, the eager or quick workers are told by the rest, "Slow down. You're making the rest of us look bad." How can we expect children to do something that most adults cannot do? Adults will tolerate racist or sexist comments at work, even when they find them offensive, because the social costs of objecting are high. Do we expect more of our kids than we do of ourselves?

Every time we are tempted to blame the individual student for not being tough enough, being too thin-skinned, or not making good choices during the school day while being taunted, we are forgetting that kids are operating as a part of a bigger context, the system of the school. What is the responsibility of that system to each child? Each time we say, "If a child is being bullied, sexually harassed or whatever, it is up to that child to say something to an adult," we are basically saying that the adults — teachers, administrators and parents — who should be and legally are responsible for the functioning of the system are not really responsible at all. As long as it is up to the children to be the signal-bearers to the adults, nothing much will change in the schools.

Adults Who Ridicule and Harass

And even this is not the whole story. Unfortunately, there are teachers and other staff members in our schools who ridicule and humiliate kids. The research of psychologist Irwin Hyman at Temple University documents that many of today's adults experienced being the target of this particular form of shaming when they were young. A seventy-seven-year-old woman of our acquaintance describes how in elementary school she was caught sticking colored paper on her hands during art class. As punishment, she was made to visit each classroom in the entire school and tell the other children what a "silly and naughty girl" she was. The shame and rage she felt are as vivid today in the remembrance as they were seven decades ago. Many adults today find it difficult to believe that school personnel still engage in this shameful behavior. We may think it is ancient history, but it isn't. We hear about it from today's kids in our interviews.

The saddest part is that although it is the adults who should be ashamed of bullying children in these ways, it is the children who end up feeling ashamed and hurt. It is true that some teachers and other adults do not as yet recognize that what they do is bullying, and that it is harmful. However, it is both of those things and it needs to stop every bit as much, if not more so, than student-to-student harassment.

Here are two examples of the powerful impact of teacher ridicule on impressionable young people. When Tom was in the seventh grade, he walked into his English class and overheard his teacher and a colleague discussing his paper, laughing and commenting negatively. At first they didn't see him, so he heard more than he should have, and certainly more than they intended. Tom was crushed. He had no idea that teachers would ever laugh about a student, or that his work would be the subject of a joke.

After that, he gave up trying and became a mediocre student, even though in elementary school he had received straight A's. Years later, he remembers this event vividly and with pain as the turning point in his academic career. And Tom was just a typical kid, not an "at-risk" kid. But when he stopped trying, it began a ripple effect that cascaded negatively through his life. He made choices that affected his future, including where he went to college. Most of all, his confrontation with adult ridicule diminished his sense of himself as smart and talented.

Though they had a close family, Tom's parents never knew what happened. They never understood why his grades slipped so much, attributing it to the idea that junior high school was just more difficult. That is the explanation that most parents give themselves when they have no other feedback to go on.

At age thirteen, Amy was a very good math student. She loved its concepts and its precision. Her parents were not worried at all that Amy would be one of the many girls who are intimidated by boys into not liking math. She wouldn't be one of the ones who took a back seat to the aggressive boys in math classes. However, one day in an advanced class in eighth grade, Amy asked a question. The teacher turned to the whole class and responded, "Isn't that the dumbest question you've ever heard?" The teacher's sarcasm gave the class permission to laugh at Amy, and she was shocked and humiliated.

This was her first encounter with a teacher's disrespectful behavior toward her. It was early in the school year, and Amy's self-protective reaction was a decision not to ask any more questions in class. This seemed like a reasonable thing to do. She did not want to risk the harassment of the teacher, nor the ridicule of her classmates. Of course, Amy's grades suffered. Math is not a subject where even most good students can afford to stop participating and still do well.

Amy did inform her parents, but when they approached the teacher, they encountered not regret and apology but arrogance and denial. There was no recovery from this bad situation; Amy just had to suffer through it until the end of the year. But, as with Tom, the impact did not end there. Amy's interest in math waned. Her sense of herself as a good math student disappeared, and her ability to ask questions in other classes all but vanished.

Students who are ridiculed by teachers in front of their peers are more likely to stop participating in class and lose interest in the subject, concluding (rightly or wrongly) that "the teacher doesn't like me." These are all coping strategies for dealing with adult bullying.

Luckily, Tom and Amy did not resort to the extreme response of dropping out of school entirely, so in that sense the danger was limited. But thousands of students every year drop out of our nation's schools because they do not feel welcomed and cherished.

Other strategies that kids come up with for avoiding harassment at school include joining some kind of a group or clique for protection, or prematurely getting involved in a romantic relationship to put a stop to sexual harassment. Psychologists have tended to believe that joining a group is a natural part of adolescence. What we have not looked at closely is the critical need of young people to protect their developing sense of self from the slings and arrows of their peers. One of the ways to do this is to have a group that accepts you and does not bully or harass you. Your own group may tease you, but they don't do it in a way that is meant to hurt you. Others will "tease" in a way that is meant to get under your skin and make you feel bad.

That is why even middle-class white boys talk to us about their "homies." This phrase, originally part of African-American culture, implies that you have a group of "home boys" from your neighborhood who will stand up for you and "watch your back." To have this certain protection for your physical well-being and for your honor is extremely important to many young people, especially boys during the school day. Interestingly, adults in schools dismiss this as simply a form of kids at play. Even many psychologists think that this is only an example of kids trying on different and new identities. In the meantime, kids are very serious about being part of a group as a means of protecting themselves emotionally.

Other kids have different ways of grouping themselves for protection. These other groups include sports teams (have you ever watched members of the boys' varsity football team walk down a school hallway together?), drama groups (who reinforce their joint "so not-average" and "crazy" self-image by sticking together), and service groups (the school leaders who are trying their best, doing their best, succeeding, and getting adult reinforcement for it).

Many young people get involved in romantic relationships before they really feel ready. While there are many reasons, one is to find an emotionally safe place when the larger social world of the teenager's life seems unsupportive, or dangerous. Often we hear about peer pressure to have sex and how that can influence our kids to act. What we have not known before is that many kids end up in romantic relationships as a means of escaping sexual harassment. We will discuss this in Chapter 6 (Sexual Harassment and Stalking).

Of course, there are many adults, including well-intentioned academics and educators, who still believe that bullying is "OK." Their argument is similar to psychologist Joan Goodman's when she says, "I think people have to experience being picked on. It's a part of life." This is analogous to saying, "Everyone should experience the impact of war. War is a fact of life." If you ask most kids, "Do you think everyone should experience being picked on? Has anything good ever come out of being picked on for you?" most kids say, "No, being picked on sucks." When we see the impact of bullying and an emotionally toxic daily environment on children, we can begin to understand why we need to intervene to help change it.

Prevention Starts with Strong Families
and Willing Schools

There are no guarantees, but we can reduce the risk of emotional violence in two ways. One is by motivating schools to do a better job in maintaining a positive climate and keeping the channels of communication open. Once schools are motivated, we can support their efforts by attending meetings, voting for school boards that are committed to the process, and encouraging our own kids to participate in the school's efforts. Much of the discussion in later chapters will focus on how to do this.

Here we will focus on increasing the ability of families to demonstrate social competence for their kids. How do they do this? Research on strong and effective families identifies a variety of successful coping strategies. Each reduces the risk, although no one can say with certainty that the risk will reach zero. One list of characteristics for strong families developed by sociologist Nick Stennet and his colleagues includes the following elements.

Appreciation. The members regard each other warmly, positively, and give support to each other as individuals. This is vitally important for both children and adults. A family that appears successful from the outside may not be working well on the inside, in the feelings among its members. As we showed in Chapter 1, psychological acceptance is a wellspring of self-esteem, and self-esteem feeds competence. Rejection, on the other hand, is a psychological malignancy. When parents reject each other, a common unintended side effect is for their children to feel rejected too.

Spending time together. Strong families spend time together and enjoy it. Being a family is not a hypothetical exercise; it takes time to knit a family together and to keep it from unraveling. This is a big issue for today's families, who must contend with commuting, TV, dual-earner marriages, and the like. Eating together, enjoying working together on projects, participating together in community and school activities — this is the stuff of which successful families are made.

Good communication patterns. Family members are honest and receptive toward each other. The process of seeking to maintain equilibrium within the family system thrives on communication. Families with many issues and topics that are off-limits for discussion become vulnerable to serious disequilibria. Conversely, families can handle a lot of change and stress if they keep talking things through, sharing needs, fears, joys, and strategies for coping. The result is a common social map that helps the whole family know where it is.

Commitment. The family unit is important to its members, as are the interpersonal relationships within the family, so energy and time need to be directed inward toward the family as a unit. Being a successful family today requires some hard choices. There are many things competing for the time and energy of family members (including work, school, friends, hobbies, and recreation). When there are no options, being committed to family is easy: it's the only show in town. In the modern world, though, you can't do everything. Particularly now, commitment is a clear and present element in successful families. Being committed means living your life with the needs of family high on your agenda.

Religious orientation. Strong families seem anchored in a sense of purpose that is religious or spiritual in its foundation. The strength required for commitment has to come from somewhere, drawn from a well of the soul. Connection with a higher spiritual force provides a firm foundation for this commitment, although it is not the only possible source. The point is that families need to be connected to something larger than just existing. Caring for the soul is an important function of a strong family. Children and adults need a sense of purpose, a sense that their lives together mean something more than just getting up, eating, going to school or work, watching TV, shopping, and going to bed. This is a deep spiritual need, and meeting it strengthens the fabric of the family.

Ability to deal with crises in a positive manner. Strong families are able to deal with conflicts, and band together in mutual support when bad times arise. Life always has thorns as well as roses. Almost every family faces painful challenges, such as illness, injury, death, separation, unemployment, natural disasters, and crime. Successful families rally together to meet these challenges, and may even emerge stronger from them. Vulnerable families fall apart or sacrifice members.

Does being a strong family mean the teenagers in that family have no secrets? The only honest answer is no. But it does reduce the risk. As Kerr and Stattin reported in their study, the best defense against adolescent secret lives is a family tradition of openness. While "the earlier, the better" is the rule, it is never too late to start the process.

The opposite of this openness that marks a successful family is what Robert Halpern and Judith Musick call "domains of silence" — topics or issues that are taboo in family discussions. Sex is a common one. Violence is another. Humiliation is a third. All three are implicated in our focus in this book on bullying, sexual harassment, and emotional violence at school, because schools face the same domains as families. Once we recognize this, it should not come as a surprise that parents are often cut off from the secret lives of their kids — even good families.

What Can You Do?

1. Listen to your children with an open mind. Try not to make assumptions or jump to conclusions. This is one message from Stattin and Miller's research: Start early with a pattern of hearing, without judgment and criticism. If you listen without interrupting, you will hear who your child really is and what he or she is experiencing at school.

2. Create ongoing opportunities for your children to talk about their lives. Talk about issues around the dinner table (of course, this requires having dinner together in the first place), or in the car during many of the transportation opportunities each week. Make it a tradition, so that when negative experiences do occur there is a habit of the heart to rely upon — a habit of disclosing what is troubled and troubling.

3. Share information with other parents. Get a second opinion. Are their kids having any trouble at school? Have their kids let any hints drop about being bullied, about hating school "all of a sudden"? The American value on family privacy is a barrier to this, of course. But letting that value prevent parents who have useful information from sharing it with other parents is too costly for all of us.

4. Seek out information from the school about your children. Teachers and administrators often complain that parents are resistant to hearing troubling information about their kids. "Not my son!" or "Not my daughter!" is no way to open the flow of information from the school to the home.

5. Seek out information from teachers and other staff about the climate at the school. How do they see it? Are they seeing more and more trouble at school, more and more "troubled kids"? Are teachers and aides saying they are enjoying their jobs less?

6. Ask teachers what you can do as a parent to provide some help to them during the school day. Often the only thing teachers in middle or high schools get from parents and administrators is aggravation. Most are overworked and operate in overcrowded classrooms. They could use something more substantial from parents and the community than a "Teacher Recognition Luncheon" once a year.

7. Think outside the box. Even though the school has always done something one way, your idea or suggestion might be very welcome — especially if you are willing to put some time into it yourself.

Copyright © 2002 by Dr. James Garbarino and Dr. Ellen deLara

About the Author

James Garbarino, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Family Life Development Center and Professor of Human Development at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Ellen deLara, Ph.D., is a Visiting Fellow in the Family Life Development Center at Cornell University. A winner of the "Just for Kids" Foundation's Award for outstanding teaching and child advocacy and the Merrill Presidential Scholars Award, she has counseled children, adolescents, couples, and families in private practice for over twenty years. She lives in Ithaca, New York.