There is no such REAL real life.

Parent Cafe
121

@Consolation @Sue22 I neglected to mention that I was not at the reunion. What I have related was told to me by my sister and BIL, who were both one year behind me in high school and attended that reunion for their class.

My sister and BIL said that everyone at the reunion heard the exchange and that reactions differed. Some thought that the police officer was out of line and had made the party uncomfortable for everyone else. But it is simply impossible that the principal doesn’t remember how he was then and what he did. I suspect that everyone at the reunion remembered too what a jerk he had been.

He was the same way with me, a skinny quiet kid back then. I got picked on too. Here’s one of my own horror stories:

Our high school was very small, so many kids played multiple sports. It was expected because, otherwise, we couldn’t field teams. I was on the basketball and track teams. We carpooled to the basketball games. I drove to one of them with two other players in my car, and then drove back to school after the game, where others had parked their cars. The jerk (principal) was also on the basketball team and in a different carpool with two of his sadistic football buddies, one of whom was driving. On the freeway, on the way back after the game, they pulled up beside my car, and the jerk (principal) and the other occupant started throwing coins out of the windows at my car. The point, obviously, was to terrorize us and do damage to my car. No matter what I did (slow down, speed up, change lanes) the other car kept pursuing mine and the occupants kept throwing coins. Eventually, miraculously, we got back to school safely, but we had to wait for the coach to catch up in his car (he had not witnessed the car chase) and open the gate to the school parking lot. The jerk got out of the other car came up to mine and started screaming “f*** you! f*** you!” at us. Over and over… To be clear, neither I nor my friends in my car had done anything to precipitate the car chase. That’s just the way those guys were. They thrived on bullying … and danger.

These same three guys (the jerk and his two sadistic football buddies) had another “game” that they’d play: one of them would extend their arm, holding an upturned knife, over a bed. The other two would take turns jumping onto the bed, belly-down, with the expectation that the one holding the knife would turn it sideways just before the other landed on the bed. They thought that this was hilarious and told everyone about their “game.”

So, yeah, no way in the world that guy doesn’t remember. Maybe he somehow turned over a new leaf and became a better person. (His two sadistic friends got hooked on drugs while in college and dropped out.) How he became a school principal though is really beyond my comprehension.

I haven’t run into him since high school, which is probably a good thing. I am no longer skinny or quiet.

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I have befriended one of my worst bullies from elementary through high school. She found me through Facebook to apologize. She became Buddhist and now works with homeless teenagers.

But I’d never want to attend a high school reunion.

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I have run into a few people from my high school over the years, although none who were the main perpetrators of physical assaults. One of them I met when she was cutting my hair at a salon. We had briefly been friends in elementary until she went on the popular path and she saw I was a liability to her upwards climb. Of course I asked her why she and the other students treated me that way. Her response was “they didn’t know how to act towards me”, I was “too smart” and “we were jealous”. In psychology we call that cognitive dissonance. In this case the person can’t reconcile her previous behavior with her current beliefs (that she is a good and kind person), so one or the other has to change. So, she simply rewrote the past. I don’t forgive them, but I also don’t dwell on it.

What I did do is teach my children (perhaps all too well) to always look out for the underdog. Not only were they taught not to bully, they were instructed to defend those that are friendless, those that are being bullied, and those who are afraid. I now work in civil rights, doing the same. I feel that is a reasonable response to bullying.

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It’s not only in PE and sports people.

I was one who was typically chosen toward the end. It really didn’t affect me that much.

However, I was forced into music. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket and have zero interest or knowledge in music. I was bullied and treated terribly because I was forced to sing out loud. I COULD NOT SING. When a program came along I wanted to take part but I was told I couldn’t because I can’t sing. Another program they said everyone could take part. I was bullied and approached and told that if I didn’t “mouth it” I would be sorry.
This affects me more to this day than being picked last in PE.

My child recently went to a band party with a friend who was in the band. He was bullied and kicked out because the band was considered elite and he was not part of it.

My kids tried their entire elementary and high school years to be a part of student government, student ambassadors etc but were told every time that their GPA’s weren’t high enough. Only “Top” students would be chosen. So many things they were told they could not take part in.

Do you think these things hurt any less than being chosen late in PE. Should we also ban these things.

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Not banned, but why would it be necessary to exclude kids because of their grades? That’s just stupidity.

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That’s kind of the point of the whole thread. The stereotypical gym teacher making the less athletic feel embarrassed and humiliated. The over reaction by the school banning everything. Then the meatball parents coming forward claiming how it makes kids “men” and “puts hair on their chest.” The reality is if people weren’t idiots none of this would happen.

127

Interesting thread. I started at a private girls’ school in Texas as an 8th grader (which was an odd year to start so there were only a few new girls). Most of the girls in my class could not have been any nicer or more welcoming, but one stood out for being mean and I still remember her mocking me. Fast forward 30 years and she’s an elementary school principal in public school in a wealthy suburb of Boston.

Some people think mean girls can change, but I do not. When someone is 14 years old, they are old enough to know they are a bully and it doesn’t matter that they are “under stress” or “upset because their parents are divorcing.”

I have a couple of college friends in that town and I need to ask them what the bully/principal’s reputation is. I can’t imagine she’s developed any compassion.

Incidentally, I have been back to most of my HS reunions and the bully has been to none. I wonder what that’s about.

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@GnocchiB says “Incidentally, I have been back to most of my HS reunions and the bully has been to none. I wonder what that’s about.”

Maybe it’s because she has changed and knows there are others in the class who are not as forgiving. I certainly hope nothing in your teen past were to surface, because unless you were a perfect teenager there is something there someone could judge you on. People are constantly evolving and changing. Some for good and some for bad.
Why do we even bother with rehabilitation facilities if people can’t change.

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Of course I wasn’t perfect, @bhs - but I have always gone out of my way to be on the lookout for those marginalized and reach out to them.

I was stating that I personally do not think that girls who bully other girls as teenagers grow out of it. That’s my opinion and based on my experience.

Why did you feel the need to attack me personally in that way?

And I don’t know what kind of rehabilitation facilities you are talking about or why they might be relevant to bullies and PE classes.

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“What doesn’t kill you might cripple you forever”. You learn grits and perseverance by learning to challenge yourself, you don’t learn it by being constantly humiliated through mental and/or physical abuses.

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@garland - I expect you might forgive the jerk if he expressed true remorse and offered a heartfelt apology.

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I met my BFF when our middle school counselor asked me to sit with her at lunch since she didn’t have any friends. She visits from Texas every summer, and bought my kids more birthday gifts than anyone other than their parents and grandparents. I’m so glad the counselor recognized that we might be a good match!

133

“That’s my opinion and based on my experience.”

I’m genuinely interested if you’ve had experience following up with that kind of person in adulthood. You didn’t share any experience of people changing or not changing. You only shared an experience of a person acting monstrous at 14 with no data about whether they grew out of it or not. I’m not in touch with anyone who was abusive around me in middle school. (My middle school, in the late 80s, was ahead of the curve in terms of making an effort to prevent overt mean-girl cruelty.)

134

We tried attending a few of my classes HS reunions. One vividly stands out. It happens that one of bullies who was my chief tormentors in grade school died just before the reunion.

One of his good friends and sidekicks came up to me and said, “Wow, aren’t you sad that [BULLY] died?” I looked him in the eye and said I was sad that another very nice classmate whom I named had just died because he was a very nice guy. I wouldn’t mourn his friend as he was a bully and hit and tormented me all thru elementary school. Sidekick sputtered (with convenient amnesia), “But you’re a girl!” I assured him I was a girl then too and walked away.

135

I think PE classes can be valuable if conducted in the right way. But they’re often not. If the goals are (as I think they should be) first to simply give kids a period of good physical activity during the school day, and second and equally if not more importantly, to develop habits and routines of healthy exercise, it seems terribly counterproductive to conduct the class in a way that routinely and publicly humiliates some kids in front of their peers. That may “toughen up” a few of them, but it seems more likely to cause emotional pain, low self-esteem, feelings of isolation and resentment, and perhaps a lifelong distaste for exercise.

Back in the day we didn’t have PE classes in elementary school, and we had gender-segregated PE classes in junior high and high school. I had always been a physically active kid, and I loved team sports, especially baseball which I was pretty good at. But I was slower to mature physically than most of the boys, so by junior high and the early years of high school when for most boys testosterone was kicking in big time, I still had the body of a younger kid. I was smaller, weaker, and slower than almost everyone in the class. Consequently I found PE classes very difficult, physically and emotionally, though fortunately I never felt bullied or publicly humiliated—the PE teachers weren’t jerks, and they wouldn’t have tolerated that kind of behavior. I also had the reputation of being “the smartest kid in the class,” and while that didn’t make me the most popular, I think it gave me a kind of protected status, as did the protection of a strong circle of friends. And eventually I caught up in the testosterone department.

The problem I had with PE classes was that the teachers, who also coached varsity athletic teams, seemed most interested in using the class to identify kids who showed athletic promise, and cultivating those kids for potential varsity-level competition. They didn’t seem the least bit interested in helping the kids who were average to below average in athletic ability. You don’t need to be a varsity-level athlete to find exercise satisfying and self-rewarding, and to make it part of your regular routine. That’s where I ended up because that’s where I started, no thanks to PE classes in helping me get there.

136

I wonder whether any of the psychologists or educators on this board can weigh in at what age you’d expect a child or teenager to have developed empathy and independent moral judgment, and should be expected to understand that despite the rush of power or the relief from peer pressure bullying provides, it s a cruel and morally wrong thing to do and should at least be abstained from, if not positively worked against?

By high school, certainly. By driving age, we are talking about criminal responsibility, but where’s the line in, say, the late elementary or middle school years?

I know of a number of cases in which bullying perpetrated in elementary school was very much egged on by competitive parents and wilfully ignored or subtly encouraged by a spiteful teacher. I was a case in point. By late middle school, we were friends. We have talked about our elementary school years since as girls and women. Those girls, while still competitive queen bees you needed to stand up to, weren’t cruel any more, and rarely mean spirited, no more than other people at least (and. F they were, very funny about it, and I am not just saying that because we were friends then!)

They would contend that I had been hard to befriend earlier because I was socially awkward (true) but that they shouldn’t have let their competitive moms egg them into cruelty,

So, child bullies can grow up into decent people. What about middle school?

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There are different types of bullies. I remember one in middle school who wasn’t really mean but liked pranks that were often not funny and sometimes hurtful or humiliating. However, one day a couple of years later when I happened to get a terrible haircut, and was ridiculed by many, he defended me. I was flabbergasted. We parted ways after that year, but he found me on social media a few years ago and offered his apologies for bullying. I assume he grew up to be a decent person.

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Developmental psychologist here. Unfortunately, there is no bright line for when “theory of mind” (the ability to take the perspective of another) or morality develop. Some would say that certain false belief tasks indicate the burgeoning of Theory of Mind at age 4, with it becoming more and more nuanced through the elementary school years. On the other hand, experiments that are nonverbal, based on eye gaze and habituation techniques, seem to indicate that even toddlers have inchoate theory of mind. Likewise for morality. Toddlers in nonverbal tasks do show an early sense of fairness, as well as sort of a tribalism (they prefer that good things happen to those who are more like them). Yet, these skills continue to become more nuanced throughout childhood. There is no age by which we can say – oops, that process is finished and no further development will occur. Furthermore, having knowledge and employing that knowledge “online” (meaning right away, with automatically in the moment), are two different things. For a lot of skills expected of adults, children can do the reasoning, but they do it slower and less automatically. They have lower impulse control and under developed executive functioning skills, meaning they are less capable of deploying and integrating multiple cognitive systems.

As for when it is too late to renounce sadism towards others, I would say in some sense never, and in some sense always. What the infamous Milgram experiments (google this if you don’t know it) demonstrate is that MOST people (the overwhelming majority) will engage in bullying and condone aggression when asked to do so by an authority figure, or by someone of higher status. So those children who are going along with a taunting bully are simply demonstrating what the adults did in Milgram. And while the Milgram experiments are now considered unethical under human subjects protection rules, they are only considered that way because of the psychological stress people had when they reflected on their own behavior during the experiment.

So, to get back to your question, there is no specific age of no return. We can only hope that at some point the individual becomes reflective enough to actually experience that stress, that cognitive dissonance, for behaving in a manner inconsistent with his or her self-image. Now,of course there are those who are self-professed, proud and “out” bullies (not mentioning any names, but one I can think of holds a position of high power in the United States). Such individuals are hopeless, regardless of age. They may be neurologically incapable of empathy.

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And don’t forget that many young bullies have been bullied (i.e., abused) by the adults in their lives. They don’t all start out terrible people and they don’t all end up terrible people. Unfortunately, some do.

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I believe athletics can teach valuable lessons, but the adults in charge need to keep their eyes open. I was a top area runner when my kids were young and they used to have to go with us to road races. One race was for women over 40 and I was competing. I finished, and joined my family. My son, who was already a top youth runner, was snickering at some of the slower, larger women in the back of the race. I got in his face and told him that those people at the back were trying as hard as they could and were beating everyone who didn’t show up, and that they deserved our applause and support. He was not the easiest kid to parent (still isn’t at 32), but a couple of weeks later at his own cross country meet, after he won, he circled back to the end and ran in with the slower runners at the back, encouraging them to finish. He’s held onto that, despite an occasional lapse into snarkiness.