I appeared on The Today Show on Sunday morning to talk about bullying. It’s a subject and format I’m well used to now.
The way it rolls is that the producer sends me four or five questions to be ready to answer. Sometimes a presenter ‘goes rogue,’ but mostly they stay on track. But nearly always, they run out of time for a question or two.
On Sunday, the question I wasn’t asked on-air was, “Adam, what are we doing wrong when it comes to bullying? How can we make our kids completely safe at school?”
My answer was going to be the suggestion that we shouldn’t – not by a long stretch – be aiming for our kids to be completely safe at school.
How on earth does a young person practice resilience, strategise to overcome the complete dicks of the world that they’ll encounter and learn to navigate risk… if they’re safe all the time?
OK, I wouldn’t have said “dicks” on breakfast telly.
I would’ve insisted that two better ambitions are for our kids to be:
- Competent: They’ve learned, through real life, the skills of handling the uncomfortable argy-bargy that other humans will manifest around us.
- Compassionate: They’ve developed an ability to know and care that their conduct affects others.
Leftover from developing those qualities will be, yes, a little bullying and occasional moments of feeling unsafe or distressed. Those moments, absent of any safety guarantee as they will be, are invaluable life lessons.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. We’re well and truly into Term 1 and I bet lots of you have already identified ‘those kids’ in your class. If you’re looking for a new way to manage student behaviour, it’s not too late to enrol in our Student Behaviour PhD.
OK, you won’t get a PhD at the end. But you will get a clear roadmap that will actually improve behaviour in your classroom.
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