If you love a child and you’re worried
that something about them is going to make them a target for bullying or
other cruelty in the future, the best possible thing you can do is give
them as much validation and support as you possibly can, and do your
best to counteract the cultural messaging they’re going to receive about the ‘wrongness’ of being different. Show that child unwavering respect as a human being, and demand that others in that child’s life also treat them with respect.
The worst possible thing you can do for a
child who is fat, gender nonconforming, disabled, LGBT+, or otherwise
different from most of the other children they will grow up knowing, is
to tell them they have to hide or get rid of their differences so people won’t be mean to them.
You
need to refuse to become a child’s first bully. The world can be an awful,
cruel place to kids who aren’t like their peers – but you can counteract
some of that cruelty instead of being the first to show it. Accept kids for who they
are and teach them that they deserve respect and care as they are, that they don’t have to earn love or kindness by suppressing parts of themselves to fit someone else’s idea of who they should be.
Even
if you actually succeed in forcing a child to be ‘more normal’, the
lessons they take away from seeing themselves as unworthy without
changing major aspects of their appearance, personality, etc., will stay
with them forever. It’s traumatic to be told who you are as a person is
a bad thing.
Whether you succeed or not, the attempt will teach them
that it’s acceptable for others to demand they change major aspects of
who they are; that bullying is an acceptable way to show love; that they deserve any cruelty people show them for being different; and that if others around them are ‘weird’, they’re entitled to bully those others into compliance just as they themselves were bullied – by you.
Children with eating disorders are in a
worse position than happy fat kids with adults in their life who love
and support them exactly as they are. Children who are bullied until
they stop self-expressing in ways that defy gender roles are in a worse
position than happy gender nonconforming kids who have adults in their
life who stand up for them and love and support them exactly as they
are.
Autistic kids who grow up in an environment where their differences
aren’t treated as burdens are better off than autistic kids who are
traumatized by abusive therapies where they’re trained to deny any uniquely autistic needs, pain, or body language and taught implicitly that who they are is lesser.
Don’t
try to change a child to make the world safer for them. By teaching them
that who they are is the problem, rather than the bullying itself, you are being part of that danger.
Instead, do everything you can to honour and respect the children you
love for who they are.
Encourage them to think well of themselves and to
not believe any messaging they’re receiving from the world that tells
them they’ll never be good enough until they conform. Seek out and
create positive representation of people like them – and people who are
different in a multitude of other ways – who are good, interesting,
worthwhile people. Compliment them on the unique ways they express
themselves. Teach them not to be afraid of not being exactly like
everyone else.
A kid can grow up different and still be
okay. But they need the support and love of the people around them to
make it in a sometimes hostile world. And they need the adults in their
life to work to keep that hostile world at bay as much as possible, and
not be part of the hostility.
the amount of
social stigma abused kids have to struggle with is just unreal. I’ve been
hearing it from day one that anyone who dares to be openly hurt
is only looking for attention.
I’ve been seeing
trauma victims stereotyped as oversensitive, needy, trouble and attention
seeking, accused of imagining things, and they’re always portrayed as a burden
on society and publicly shamed for whatever they’ve gone thru. Any kind of
pain or discomfort in children no matter how high, apparently needs to be dealt
with as a personal problem and should be kept well away from society who just
doesn’t wanna deal with such nonsense.
I’ve seen children
who tried to tell the society about abuse only to be shamed, punished and
humiliated because “they should have known better” and “they
should have taken it better” and “they should just get over
themselves”. Even the notion that their life matters and their pain means
something and that trauma is devastating their life is looked upon as them
being “immature” and “self centered”.
Thanks to all
this one big part of being abused and traumatized is the added guilt for
needing attention, for needing comfort and reassurance. Survivors are forced to
feel selfish and miserable for even considering that it should matter if
they’re in pain, that their struggle is important enough to talk about it out
loud. We’re told that we’re pathetic and stupid for even thinking we matter, not only by abusers, but by counselors, therapists, media, television, our peers and society at large. How are we supposed to fight it? How are we supposed to heal? How come there’s no path for us to walk on, and the world acts like it would be better if we didn’t exist? We never asked for this. And we don’t deserve it.
All of this, all of the stigma, shaming, apathy and hatred should fall on abusers. Not. Victims.
This is why victims and survivors are afraid to talk about their abuse. And then people ask them why they kept it a secret and didn’t talk about it sooner. It’s hard to know who is safe to talk to and who won’t judge or shame you. We need to be loving, not judging.
Tear Gassing children is a bad thing. Full Stop. Their counter-argument is only that it’s necessary to tear-gas them.
Which is all sorts of pathetic.
This is why I have so much trouble with “moral rules alone are enough.”
Once you’ve stopped reacting to children in pain… I don’t necessarily doubt your general intelligence, but I no longer even KNOW HOW reasoning with you would even work.
It’s wild to see how fast Republican talking points get assimilated. I’ve already seen hundreds of comments about how “Obama tear gassed immigrants at the border too.”
Tear gas is used regularly in law enforcement and at the border. For a very long time. During the Obama administration and decades before. This is not new news.
What makes this situation unique is the use against innocent bystanders and children.
That is the issue.
Children are more likely to experience permanent health issues.
This was not some surprise happenstance. The Trump administration has been quarterbacking this entire affair. They are intimately involved and made no plan of action to account for the children they knew would be there.
Most of the time these agencies run with a fair amount of autonomy. Neither Obama nor Trump would be involved in decisions involving riot control. But Trump has been talking about this goddamn caravan for months and even sent troops down there. He doesn’t get to distance himself from this.
“But Obama gassed people at the border once a month!”
Really? Obama himself did that? Or was it an agency he had no direct involvement with? How much tear gas? What kind of danger was involved? Were there dozens of children nearby?
What was the context?
When the police used tear gas in Ferguson while there were kids in the crowd, I remember people being very upset about that too. Why are people saying liberals have never been outraged about tear gas before?
I personally don’t like the use of chemical agents as crowd control in general, but I admit it is preferable to gunning people down. But it needs to be a last resort. And getting small rocks thrown at you when you have body armor and ballistic shields does not seem like a last resort kind of situation. When innocent bystanders and children are involved, you need to consider other options.
Retreating and regrouping did not seem to be an option considered at the border. I guess they gotta be tough and stand their ground to protect an imaginary line. It’s better to tear gas some kids than move back a few hundred yards.
But the talking point is out there now. It’s in every comment section. Every tweet thread. Every YouTube video.
“Obama did it too.”
I guess that makes it okay then.
We’re going by grade school morals now.
Billy ate glue and didn’t get in trouble so I should be able to eat glue as well.
Years of research have shown that spanking children is ineffective and potentially harmful. These facts have led the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend, in a new policy statement published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, that parents not spank, hit or slap their children. This statement from America’s leading group of pediatricians, with 67,000 members, is an update to guidance they issued in 1988 that recommended parents “be encouraged and assisted in developing methods other than spanking” to discipline kids.
This new statement is especially significant because it reflects decades of critical new research on the effects of corporal punishment and because parents and educators put enormous trust in pediatricians for discipline advice –almost as much as they trust their own parents and spouses. So when pediatricians say not to spank, there is a very good chance that parents will listen. That is a good thing, because we need to stop hitting our children in the name of discipline. And yes – spanking is just a euphemism for “hitting children.” We do not allow adults to hit each other, but for some reason American society has decided it should be legal and even desirable for adults to hit children. We need to end this double standard and provide children with the same protection from hitting that is given to all adults.
The good news is that incremental change in norms is slowly happening. Hospitals across the country are implementing “no hit zones,” a policy that I have studied and advocated for, that do not allow hitting of any kind, including parents spanking children. City leaders in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and Madison Heights, Michigan, have made their whole cities into “no hit zones.” Just like no smoking zones, no hit zones are enforced through social pressure to change behavior, not jail time. Initiatives such as no-hit zones, especially if paired with education campaigns about effective discipline, are good steps to change the national conversation about spanking.
There are practical reasons to stop spanking. The main one is that it does not work. Some parents may say, “But it does for my child.” A child may cry and stop what she is doing in the moment, but numerous studies involving hundreds of thousands of children show that spanking does not make children better behaved in the long run, and in fact makes their behavior worse. It is hard for parents to see this in their day-to-day interactions, but the research is clear: We consistently find that the more a child is spanked, the more aggressive he or she will be in the future.
Spanking also teaches children that it is acceptable to use physical force to get what you want. It is thus no surprise that the more children are spanked, the more likely they are to be aggressive or to engage in delinquent behaviors like stealing.
Millions of parents have raised well-adjusted children without spanking. Kids thrive on attention from adults. Nothing is perfect, but telling children clearly what you expect from them and then praising them when they do it is the best approach to discipline.
In order to see reductions in spanking across our society, we need changes in the social norm that hitting children is acceptable. We already view hitting adults as not acceptable, so we just need to expand that social norm a bit to include children. Changing social norms may be challenging in regions of the country, like the South, or in some communities, like conservative Christian denominations, which have strongly held beliefs about the necessity of hitting children to discipline them. These norms can be changed, but it will likely take time and many conversations about our collective goals for our children.
The majority of us who were spanked by our parents think we “turned out OK.” Perhaps we did. But maybe we were lucky that our parents did other things, like talking with us about what behaviors they wanted to see us do in the future, that helped us develop self-control and make good behavior choices. Given the dozens of research studies demonstrating that spanking increases the risk of harm to children, it seems that we “turned out OK” in spite of spanking, not because of it. We can be the generation of parents who break the cycle of spanking and do better by the next generations of children. Let us teach them how to behave without spanking or hitting.
Just goes to show if you look long and hard enough, you can find a study somewhere by someone to prove what ever you want. Have to dig deep to find out who funded, why and what their hidden agenda is regarding this study and the desired results. There are equal studies to prove otherwise. One is how crime has risen since this thought process started several years ago. Also another study has shown that in those homes the kids have taken over and run the households.
You people are amazing, and not in a good way.
Some people are really out there thinking beating their kids is the way to cut crime rates.
@zelu4590 Got a link to that credible scientific study that says crime rates are rising?
Wait, no, you said equal studies. Got a link to that 50-year meta-analysis with literal hundreds of thousands of data points that says crime rates are rising?
I’d really like to see that, because it’d be at odds with literally all of the data.
Just goes to show the kind of actively-maintained ignorance and fear you have to live in to think that hitting children is how you make them good people.
POWHATAN, Virginia — Alex Campbell was just 7 years old when, he says, his principal dragged him down the hall to the school’s “crisis room.”
Administrators reserved the room, a converted storage closet, for children who acted out. He still remembers the black-painted walls. The small window he was too short to reach. The sound of a desk scraping across the floor, as it was pushed in front of the door to make sure he couldn’t get out.
Alex, who has autism spectrum disorder, says he was taken there more than a half-dozen times in first grade, for behavior such as ripping up paper or refusing to follow instructions in class. The room was supposed to calm him down. Instead, it terrified him.
“When I asked for help or asked if anyone was still there, nobody would answer,” Alex said. “I felt alone. I felt scared.”
Alex is determined to close the seclusion rooms for good. Last week, the 13-year-old told his story to legislators, congressional staff and advocates to mark the introduction of the Keeping All Students Safe Act, a bill that would bar the use of seclusion and significantly curtail the use of restraints in schools that receive federal funds. No federal law currently regulates the use of such practices on students.
“We believe schools should have a safe environment for students to learn and grow,” said Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District. Scott sponsored the legislation with fellow Democrat Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia’s 8th District.
“It’s a civil rights issue,” added Scott, who serves as the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “Children should not be subjected to practices that are counterproductive, endangering their safety or health.”
Alex tried to keep the “crisis room” a secret.
No laws required school administrators to tell his parents what was happening. Alex says the principal warned him that if he said anything, he would spend the rest of the year locked in the room.
But Alex’s parents said they could tell something was wrong. They noticed unexplained bruises on his knees. He became increasingly anxious. His father Sean Campbell, who works as a data specialist in a public school system, thought it was especially strange when Alex visited the school where he worked and asked where the children got “locked up.” He stopped wanting to go to sleep.
“That’s when it hit me,” Campbell, Alex’s father, said. “He doesn’t want to wake up because he doesn’t want to go to school.”
Eventually, Alex broke.
“He started babbling like crazy,” Campbell said. “‘I can’t go back to that room. I can’t go back.’”
The idea of the school not notifying them appalled Alex’s mother, Kelly Campbell, who has taught in public schools for 11 years. “If a child falls on the playground and bumps their head, I’m obligated to call the parents,” she said. “I’ve been told that in every school I’ve worked with. Something like that could happen to Alex, and nobody has to know about it? Like it’s some dark secret?”
While a landmark piece of federal legislation called the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, mandates that all students with disabilities are provided with a free public education tailored to meet their needs, regulations governing the use of restraint and seclusion in schools vary from state to state. Many states don’t require school administrators to notify parents when their child is restrained or secluded. According to a recent analysis published by the Autism National Committee, only 28 states provide “meaningful protections against restraint and seclusion” for children, including those with disabilities.
Can we address the fact that people with good parents get super offended when you explain how awful yours were? Saying things like “your parents would do anything for you”, or “you’re lucky they gave you a roof. Be grateful”. Nope. No you are not going to guilt me into thinking abuse was okay just because they met the basic requirements for the care of a child.
It’s wonderful that your parents are great and would do anything for you. But that statistic does not apply to every parent, and it’s so invalidating and dangerous to imply that, so stop. Think, really deeply think about what I’m saying and why.
Totally agree that victim-shaming is disgusting and never okay!!!!
But just an important heads-up: people who get defensive, i.e. uncomfortable, in any way when you tell them about your abusive parents, are abused themselves without knowing it.
Someone who REALLY had good parents would have absolutely no reason to get angry at you for venting about your abuse. Why should they?
The only explanation for people saying things like this is that it makes them extremely uncomfortable, because it forces them to look at their own parents. Another person’s abuse always triggers an emotional flashback to your own abuse. For example, if someone complains how their parents got angry at them for crying, it would immediately make them think/feel of how they feel when they cry, i.e. what their parents taught them about crying through their reaction to them crying.
I know it’s a really unknown fact that most people suffer from emotional abuse, but it really is part of our culture. How people react to your trauma is a good way of telling how much they know about their own trauma (not saying that people who react compassionately to you aren’t traumatised – they either have experience in this (which might stem from their own abuse too!) and/or they already know about their own trauma. Only asking them directly will of course give you the truth.).
But yeah – people with good parents don’t say such things. It sounds like they are just repeating what their own abusive parents would say.
I think it kind of depends. As someone who is disabled I hit a lot of people that deny my BODY is harming me bacause they simply cannot deal with the idea that something like that could actually be out of their control and therefore is a threat to their moral system.
Victim blaming is a thing usually because people cannot accept that if they were in the same situation they would also be powerless. It’s outsourcing your emotional problems to the other person so you can just continue with the same beliefs.
It is absolutely good to keep in mind that it might be denial of trauma but sometimes people are legtimately being abusive dicks about it who are just prioritizing not having to question their world views over not hurting people.
Can we address the fact that people with good parents get super offended when you explain how awful yours were? Saying things like “your parents would do anything for you”, or “you’re lucky they gave you a roof. Be grateful”. Nope. No you are not going to guilt me into thinking abuse was okay just because they met the basic requirements for the care of a child.
It’s wonderful that your parents are great and would do anything for you. But that statistic does not apply to every parent, and it’s so invalidating and dangerous to imply that, so stop. Think, really deeply think about what I’m saying and why.
Totally agree that victim-shaming is disgusting and never okay!!!!
But just an important heads-up: people who get defensive, i.e. uncomfortable, in any way when you tell them about your abusive parents, are abused themselves without knowing it.
Someone who REALLY had good parents would have absolutely no reason to get angry at you for venting about your abuse. Why should they?
The only explanation for people saying things like this is that it makes them extremely uncomfortable, because it forces them to look at their own parents. Another person’s abuse always triggers an emotional flashback to your own abuse. For example, if someone complains how their parents got angry at them for crying, it would immediately make them think/feel of how they feel when they cry, i.e. what their parents taught them about crying through their reaction to them crying.
I know it’s a really unknown fact that most people suffer from emotional abuse, but it really is part of our culture. How people react to your trauma is a good way of telling how much they know about their own trauma (not saying that people who react compassionately to you aren’t traumatised – they either have experience in this (which might stem from their own abuse too!) and/or they already know about their own trauma. Only asking them directly will of course give you the truth.).
But yeah – people with good parents don’t say such things. It sounds like they are just repeating what their own abusive parents would say.
what the blue bloody hell is this? how on earth is that supposed be standard police practice?
Honestly if you havent seen this show/episode you won’t undertstand that child was something else smdh
It doesn’t matter how bloody ridiculous the child is. as the POLICE, you do not instigate a situation in which the child attacks you so you can then charge her for assaulting an officer or whatever else! That’s abuse of power. They have, or should have, training on how to deal with people who are being assholes. What has she taught the child, really? That the police are abusive fucks? Well yeah, they are. Have always been. And … what then?
Then how was the officer supposed to handle it? With a gentle “Ma’am, please don’t do that, that is attempted assault of an officer”? Yeah, cops can be brutal, no doubt, but this girl shouldn’t have gotten ramped up and swung. I could understand the fury if the girl was being complacent and cooperative, even if she was a little moody, then I’d say, “Hey, that’s unnecessary force, she wasn’t even a threat.” This girl in the .gif was being a threat, simple as that. If she didn’t want to get taken down the way she was, she shouldn’t have instigated the fight, simple as that. No one is going to care about her age, background, gender, whatever when she pulls the first punch. And fights, even when one side is getting neutralized, are not neat and clean like they are in the movies. It’s gonna be messy. That’s now and forever, fights aren’t clean and cute. The girl had to be a neutralized threat and that’s what happened.
I’m afraid I can’t agree. Professional security, let alone the police, are trained in deescalation techniques. The officer had a choice to escalate or deescalate, and the officer chose to escalate. The officer has the training, the officer has the power, the officer instigated by saying, “Hit me if you want to” knowing exactly what was going to happen next.
That’s straight-up instigation and entrapment on the part of the officer, who is doing pretty much the opposite (in terms of space management, body language, etc) of what is helpful to deescalate a potentially violent situation.
But I’m not even going to talk about that, because it’s already been said.
What I want to talk about is how absurdly, unnecessarily brutal and UNSAFE that takedown was. That officer has superior size and body mass on that kid; in the event that this really was an unsalvagable situation and the child was an immediate threat to self/others who needed to be physically restrained, throwing the kid into a steel bench is fucking unacceptable – that’s asking for some pretty horrific bruising at best, and a spine injury or broken bones at worst. If that child had to be restrained, the correct thing to do would have been to deflect the first punch, then use established momentum to spin her around and put her into a supine or prone position on that nice flat floor there. That would be a safe, minimally-violent restraint for safety.
But that’s not what happened here, and I can tell you exactly why. You, in fact, already identified it:
“fights, even when one side is getting neutralized, are not neat and clean like they are in the movies. It’s gonna be messy. That’s now and forever, fights aren’t clean and cute”
This isn’t the professional conduct of a person addressing someone in acute crisis, trying to deescalate the situation and maintain the safety of all involved parties, resorting to physical restraint only when absolutely necessary. This is a FIGHT. This is an adult figure with significant authority starting a fight with a kid.
The following may stray into Appeal to Authority: I work at a group home for kids who’ve been removed from their homes (usually due to abuse or neglect; these are kids with trauma histories) who can’t be cycled right into foster care because of violent behaviors that make them unsafe to themselves or unsafe to be in the general community. I used to work with the kids 6-12, and now I work with the kids 12-18.
Years I’ve worked in this field: six
Number of punches thrown at me: countless
Number of physical restraints I’ve performed: THREE.
Three physical restraints, in six years of work, across a population of over a hundred children of assorted ages. Because it is that easy to deescalate a situation – even one where punches are already being thrown – without resorting to physical takedowns, if you have very basic training in how to do so.
Words I’ve never said to a kid in crisis: “hit me if you want to”
This is not appropriate conduct. This is brutality.
And to answer your question here:
“Then how was the officer supposed to handle it?”
At the beginning of this video, when the kid is angrily running in place? Take a step back, stand in a neutral pose (hands at sides, feet shoulder-width apart, as little tension in the body as you can manage) keep a neutral expression on your face, and WAIT. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything, just wait. The kid will get tired of running in place and burn through their immediate panic energy/anger. They will reach physical and mental fatigue WAY before you do. Maintain your calm and composure, because you are a fucking adult with coping skills and can manage your stress in this situation. A kid often -can’t- because they don’t HAVE the coping skills you have.
And if you can’t, because you don’t have the coping skills? You have no fucking business being in a position of authority.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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