~ Continued from Day 111(J)

As Charles and I have been writing in our recent posts, we have been deliberating on what kind of educational environment we want for our children. We felt a dire need to reassess their current school environment because S and J have had to fend for themselves in recurrent circumstances where they were subject to bullying, mean girl cliques, rude and disrespectful verbal abuse and gossiping.

It is amazing how clearly we can see when we are not asleep! I attribute this clear seeing to our new way of being and living with consciousness and awareness. For years we’ve been receiving unsatisfactory and deficient responses to our feedback to the school around their approach to emotional and social development, but we were not awake to make the connection between what we experienced and what it meant. To a large extent we were living in illusion and denial.

Although we chose this school for S and J because we believed in its approach to providing a nurturing social and emotional environment for “gifted” children, year after year we witnessed how it fell short of delivering its promise. We saw early on that the school’s responses to children with disciplinary issues were puzzling at best. When S asked for her teacher’s help when she was bothered by rambunctious boys at school, starting as early as 1st grade, the teachers told her that she was “too sensitive” and that she ought to “just ignore them.”

Looking back, most of S and J’s classmates who left the school over the years were the “sensitive” (or as I prefer to refer to them, “emotionally intelligent”) children who were S and J’s friends. Their parents were alert enough to see what we didn’t see at the time and pull their children out of the school. Ultimately, Charles and I are accountable for S and J’s education, and I take full responsibility for our parental accountability: Charles and I chose to send S and J to this school year after year, naively believing in the words we heard from the Head of School.

We kept investing in that school with not only our money, time and children, but also, our hope, faith, and confidence that the school must know what it was doing and that it would do its job to provide a nurturing environment. We placed our trust in the school rightly or wrongly, and hoped that it would do a better job in the social and emotional development of our children. Frankly, academic excellence was my secondary or even tertiary concern for S and J’s elementary school education.

We saw that beginning in 3rd grade, there were a handful of boys whose behavior was getting worse, but S and J were repeatedly told by their teachers to “just ignore them.” They often felt helpless at school because they were not heard by those who had the authority to bring order to what S and J saw as wrong, unfair, and disrespectful behavior. What they saw was that their teachers would rather ignore it and look the other way.

In 4th grade when J had a bullying incident, we told J’s homeroom teacher that this wasn’t just about J and the boys who bullied her but that bullying needed to be dealt with class-wide so that everyone’s awareness was raised to guard against the poison of bullying. I told him that the same boys were harassing other children and they needed to be disciplined. All the students needed to understand the school policy against bullying, as well as protective and preventive measures they can take, and reporting and redressing processes for victims and bystanders. Above all, I told him that we’d be raising “monsters” if we didn’t teach these smart children how to be kind and compassionate. What kind of leaders of tomorrow would these children be if they advanced intellectually, but remained emotionally and socially stunted and dysfunctional?

As far as I know, the teacher never held an anti-bullying class with J’s grade that year. It was painful for me to realize how much the children who started school with S and J had veered from their Pre-Kindergarten year’s innocence and sweetness. As they have been in the same school with S and J since those tender years, I always felt that they were like my own nephews and nieces. Yet, they have changed so much over the years, and some parents don’t seem to know or see the changes their children are experiencing emotionally and socially in their pre-teen years. More than anything these children need guidance and mentoring from caring, compassionate and thoughtful adults.

This year, with the increased freedom of going from class to class on their own, the bullying, teasing, name calling, and disrespectful and rude behaviors of the instigators spun freely out of control. It appears that the children were not socially or emotional prepared for the freedom granted to them. Very recently, the school has finally recognized that these students need more social and emotional education, and has started to take the issue seriously. We hope they can get the bullying under control.

Ultimately, Charles and I are responsible for S and J’s education. We have asked ourselves: What kind of educational environment will nurture our daughters’ gifts to blossom fully in line with our family values? As if we needed to receive another sign from the Universe on this very question, Charles and I heard the answer loud and clear yet again this morning.

We approached the mother of a boy who used to play with our daughters because we wanted to ask her if she could talk with her son about not joining in with his friends who are bullying S and J. She responded that bullies are everywhere in life and S and J might as well learn to deal with them, and that the problem is S and J are “too sensitive.” She advised Charles and me to help S and J with a strategy to deal with bullies at school.

We realized what a gift of insight we received from her! I stand by my belief that “it takes a village to raise a child.” It takes not only the school, but also the parents to create a nurturing environment for our children to grow up with healthy minds, bodies and souls. The truth is that bullies also suffer in bullying because their souls are locked up tightly and they lose their joy, vitality, and creativity in life. Another truth is that unless the school, students and their parents all work together to co-create and cultivate a school culture that does not allow bullying to spread its poison, dealing with bullying on a case-by-case basis won’t be effective. If the “ring leader” is uprooted, the next in line will step up. Similarly, if all the “emotionally intelligent” (or “sensitive”) students leave the school, there will always be another layer of victims to target. Could this parent really think that this is the best our community can do?

As we look back on our journey with the school, above all we are grateful for how resilient S and J have been for years in this environment that has been sub-optimal for nurturing their gifts. Even with the odds stacked against them, their intuition regarding right and wrong, positive and negative, and helpful and useless, as well as their self-esteem all remain intact. They clearly understand that the bullying is not their fault although they are fatigued (and we are too) from standing up to speak the truth and shine the light in situations where they need to defend themselves or their friends.

Our daughters deserve a community of kindred spirits who recognize their gifts and value them. It is up to Charles and me to find that community for them. And this time we know what to look for.