Last month, I read about a shocking new scientific discovery. I’m not Neal DeGrasse Tyson but I do try to stay informed. So I read magazines that focus on scientific findings and newsworthy events, like Discover, National Geographic, and The Onion. An August study from Florida Atlantic University determined middle school students are meaner to peers who aren’t pretty or involved in sports. Who wudda guessed?
FAU Ph. D student Mary Page James, the author of the study, proclaimed, “Despite widespread public messages about body acceptance, the adolescent social world is often still quite unforgiving.”
Wow! Adolescents enduring all kinds of pressure— peer, parental, authoritative, hormonal— are mean to each other— especially anyone not in their peer group. I left junior high 58 years ago and still vividly recall nastiness associated with my lovable classmates, a group I long ago started referring to as the Food Chain.
Social status in school is more complicated than Ms. James implies. Pretty and athletic are only two examples of kids who have an easier time making friends than some others. In every school system I survived, having rich or wellconnected parents also offered better possibilities than the unwashed masses. Seniority was another strong indicator. New kids always have a hard time adjusting to different circumstances. The Eagles wrote a song about it.
For many generations everyone just accepted the way things worked and tried to cope and survive the experience. Our mothers offered empathetic analogies about jumping off cliffs and dads suggested popping someone in the nose. The more creative among us developed careers in popular music, literature, or comedy to not only cope with the damage but exact revenge as well. The rest just survived.
Then somewhere along the line, things changed. Rather than helping kids adjust to adulthood, parents began treating their children as precious treasures to be protected at all costs and kept worry free and devoid of even minor pain until adulthood, when they would magically become well-adjusted mature citizens just by turning 21.
When this fad became established as fact, every parent with a social conscience and some free time decided to join the fight against bullying. Helicopter parents began focusing only on issues involving their own children, obviously the most important ones, and we suddenly had hundreds of different ideas about fighting such behavior. Bullying, which has been an issue since humans first began interacting, suddenly became a serious problem.
Today, every successful celebrity talks emotionally about how growing up rich, pretty, and accepted traumatized them. Magazine articles about famous people almost always include a heart wrenching paragraph discussing bullying episodes.
Events that once were laughed off or struggled through, suddenly involved mental health officials, childcare experts, and police officers. The medical profession found drugs that were effective and profitable. Then social media entered the picture, which amplified every bad instance. Now, decades later, bullying is still a persistent, unsolvable problem.
I frequently read Facebook posts about how idyllic our childhoods were, happy days riding bikes in the sunshine and playing ball until dusk. No one mentions the power struggles of junior high and associated trauma.
Obviously, they didn’t share a birthday with a “top-of-the-food-chain” pretty girl.
Leave a Reply