Let me offer some advice to mothers and fathers about what you can do to prevent wounded spirits from overtaking your children.
As a teacher, I made it clear to my students that I wouldn’t put up with teasing. If anyone insisted on ridiculing another of my students, he was going to have to deal with me. When a strong, loving teacher comes to the aid of the least-respected child in the class, something dramatic occurs in the emotional climate of the room. Every child seems to utter an audible sigh of relief.
The same thought bounces around in many little heads: If that kid is safe from ridicule, then I must be safe too. By defending the least-popular child in the classroom, the teacher is demonstrating that she respects everyone and that she will fight for anyone who is being treated unfairly.
Children love justice and they’re very uneasy in a world of injustice and abuse. Therefore, when we teach children kindness and respect for others by insisting on civility in our classrooms and in our homes, we’re laying a foundation for human kindness in the world of adulthood to come.
While you are working behind the scenes with your child’s teacher and school system to protect him from abuse, you must not make him feel victimized beyond the immediate circumstance. It is very easy to give a boy the idea that the world is out to get him. That overarching sense of victimization is terribly destructive. It paralyzes a person and makes him throw up his hands in despair.
Once he yields to the insidious notion that he can’t win — that he is set up for failure — he becomes demoralized. The will to overcome adversity is weakened. Talk to your boys not about the wider world that is stacked against them, but teach them how to deal with the isolated situation that has arisen. You must never make your child think you believe he is destined for failure and rejection. He will believe you!
—Dr. James Dobson
Excerpted by permission from Bringing Up Boys (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2001).
