Bullies, or Who Stole My Ukulele?
This is going to be an at least three part series of posts on bullying as witnessed over the last year that I'll relate to bullies in the workplace and their contribution to overall workplace toxicity levels. That'll be the Ukulele Story.
But for now I'm going to talk about bullying in an abstract fashion.
It’s been interesting dealing with kids this past year because after all kids are people with the same drives and emotions as adults except without the psychological masking, rationalizations, or experiential framework to guide their behavior. As most people know bullying is not something that goes away as people get older, but something one encounters too often even if it's masked beneath other names.
What surprised me over this past year was noticing how not all kids reacted to bullying in the same way.
With my first and second graders it was hard to distinguish bullying as separate from the general tumult of their experience. The exception being when say a fifth grader started bullying a second grader, but even then the second grader's ego was more malleable and likely to bounce back without damage because there was less cruft accumulated around the wires. Then around about the fourth grade things started to get different. By then the personality/ego/whatever had become more fixed and bullying became more perilous, and one was apt to embrace it as the norm and let it shape behavior.
After that, puberty comes along and all this ego/identity posturing ramps up and gets really weird.
Take all this with a grain of salt. I’m not a behavioral psychologist, nor am I positing a cut and dry series of developmental stages. Basically all I’m saying is younger kids bounce back from bullying better than older kids, because younger kids have a less fixed attachment to their sense of self. It's not really a groundbreaking observation, but it did get me thinking.
For visualization purposes imagine a stick.
That's the sense of self. A little kid can encounter something threatening to the stick and let go of it easily before grabbing the stick in the same place or elsewhere soon after the event. An older kid, a teen, or an adult when they lose their handle on the stick it takes a lot longer for them to get hold of it again, and there’s always the possibility that they won’t.
We’re not gifted by default with infinite adaptability.
And if the stick breaks, or even more importantly if one perceives the stick as breaking, because, really, the stick’s a fabrication, then one’s likely to encounter something really ugly.
Which I'll talk about next time when I tell you about some of my students.
But for now I'm going to talk about bullying in an abstract fashion.
It’s been interesting dealing with kids this past year because after all kids are people with the same drives and emotions as adults except without the psychological masking, rationalizations, or experiential framework to guide their behavior. As most people know bullying is not something that goes away as people get older, but something one encounters too often even if it's masked beneath other names.
What surprised me over this past year was noticing how not all kids reacted to bullying in the same way.
With my first and second graders it was hard to distinguish bullying as separate from the general tumult of their experience. The exception being when say a fifth grader started bullying a second grader, but even then the second grader's ego was more malleable and likely to bounce back without damage because there was less cruft accumulated around the wires. Then around about the fourth grade things started to get different. By then the personality/ego/whatever had become more fixed and bullying became more perilous, and one was apt to embrace it as the norm and let it shape behavior.
After that, puberty comes along and all this ego/identity posturing ramps up and gets really weird.
Take all this with a grain of salt. I’m not a behavioral psychologist, nor am I positing a cut and dry series of developmental stages. Basically all I’m saying is younger kids bounce back from bullying better than older kids, because younger kids have a less fixed attachment to their sense of self. It's not really a groundbreaking observation, but it did get me thinking.
For visualization purposes imagine a stick.
That's the sense of self. A little kid can encounter something threatening to the stick and let go of it easily before grabbing the stick in the same place or elsewhere soon after the event. An older kid, a teen, or an adult when they lose their handle on the stick it takes a lot longer for them to get hold of it again, and there’s always the possibility that they won’t.
We’re not gifted by default with infinite adaptability.
And if the stick breaks, or even more importantly if one perceives the stick as breaking, because, really, the stick’s a fabrication, then one’s likely to encounter something really ugly.
Which I'll talk about next time when I tell you about some of my students.