The Perils of Being the New Kid

In the small California town where I grew up in the 1950s, a few unkind children made life briefly unpleasant but didn’t have much effect overall on the dynamic of my time at school.  In my early teens, school settled in the typical pattern of a small group of popular kids who ignored the rest of us.  I was fortunate enough to go to a high school where ostracism was rare and had at least some connection to what a person did or said. In situations where the grudge was personal, it didn’t spread to infect the rest of the class.

It seems our country has been overtaken by a mean-spiritedness visible every day not just in the corridors of schools, but the corridors of power. It seems as if it’s grown acceptable simply not to like others, and worse, to act on it. 

When school becomes a nightmare, battered self-esteem, depression and fear set in, sometimes leaving vulnerable young people feeling there is no solution but to die.  That has happened at the hand of school bullies several times in the last year. According to national statistics, about 32 percent of students ages 12 to 18 report being bullied in school. Typical this consists of being  shoved, tripped or spit on; or being the subject of rumors or generally made fun of. Only about a third of the victims told a teacher or other authority about it.

Complicating the matter, as we all know, is the fact that bullies now have the internet as a platform for their viciousness. Bullies libel classmates on Facebook and Twitter, and through text messages and e-mail,  and post embarrassing photos online. In a survey on WiredSafety.org, almost half of the respondents said they’d been “cyberbullied” before, and more than half had a friend who had gotten such treatment.

When I was young I couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly live to be thirty, much less eighty--look at how many days, weeks, months that would take! I was pretty happy with my life overall, but when things were tough, it was hard to convince myself that whatever I was experiencing at the time wasn’t going to characterize the rest of my life. The future loomed ahead like a thick, black cloud during the bad times, and I believed that whatever I didn’t like about myself would stick to me like tar forever.  It's painful to think of how much darker some children must think their future is.

 Military children are known for their adaptability, but in this new environment being the new kid in school may make them particularly susceptible to bullying, especially in schools where classmates have been bonding since kindergarten. A concerned Department of Defense recently joined with four other departments of our national government to create a federal task force on school bullying. in an article “DOD Takes Steps to Stop Bullying,” by Elaine WIlson of the American Forces Press Service, Barbara Thompson, director of the Pentagon’s office of family policy, children and youth,  says that “it’s gotten the attention of the country just how invasive any type of bullying is to the well-being of a victim.” 

Wilson’s article is lengthy, and I will write more about it tomorrow.  For now, I encourage readers to take the time to watch this video about bullying in schools. It’s made by Tony Bartoli, a motivational speaker, and though I’m not endorsing him specifically, this is worth watching for the sobering statistics he presents.