Thompson - Mom, Theyre Teasing Me: Helping Your Child Solve Social Problems

W hat exactly is a parent supposed to do when a child comes home from school in tears because of a teasing incident or a friendship disaster? What do you do when your daughter is obviously in need of help in a social situation but, as upset as she is, she's even more distraught at the idea that you might call the other parent or the teacher? So she pleads with you, Don't call, Mom, please don't. Oh my God, you'll just make it worse! What do you do if your child isn't receiving any birthday party invitations? How do you talk to other parentsor should you talk to other parents about the fact that the phone never rings for your child? And if you are a teacher, what exactly is your role in protecting children from rejection or dealing with overly powerful cliques? Do you know that there is a secret social underworld playing out in front of your eyes every day? How much can you do to change it? How much worry is too much? How can we separate our children's experiences from our own painful memories of teasing or rejection?

We wrote this book to help answer questions such as these, questions that parents, teachers, and other adults face on a daily basisquestions that we have been asked again and again as we have traveled around the United States and overseas, giving workshops for parents and consulting to schools. Wherever we go, we hand out index cards and ask our audiences to share with us their worries about their children or their students. We have gathered hundreds of these question cards over the years, and from those we have focused on forty of the most commonand the most compellingin these pages.

We want this book to help you understand the painful challenges as well as the extraordinary joys of children's social lives. We are two psychologists who specialize in children; we also do troubleshooting in schools and run workshops for parents and teachers. In our experience, problems that kids experience in their social lives are some of the most painful problems of all. Why do we say that? We have seen more mothers weep over these issues than they do about any other childhood problem.

When a parent is weeping or seething with anger about something going on socially with his or her child, the only response in that moment is empathy. But when things cool off a little, we have found that it often helps to explain some things about child development, so we will describe some of the psychological discoveries that we have found most illuminating. But as parents ourselves, we have been humbled to realize that sometimes knowledge of psychology is not much help. As much as we want to help, we sometimes lack data. Sometimes a child doesn't tell us her true feelings about a situation, so we are working with incomplete information, or she tells us but gives an account that is slanted in one way or another. (We often refer to this bias in reporting events to us with the phrase It all started when she hit me back.)

Much of the time it turns out that perspective is more important than knowledge. If you are a parent, you already know that perspective is the toughest thing to maintain in child rearing. We all marvel at the balanced parent, the parent who doesn't explode, the parent with the light touch, the parent who doesn't get overinvolved, the consummate stage manager who can invisibly create an environment in which children solve their own difficulties. We all want to be like that, but very often were pulled into a situation prematurely, or we hang back too long.

Here's a quick example of how important it is to get a broader perspective on children's social experiences. Imagine a mom and a psychologist standing outside a school talking. They are watching her son play on the climbing structure with a bunch of other kids, mostly younger than he is. As the grown-ups chat and watch the play, her son starts being very rough and mean with the smaller children. The psychologist wonders if the mom is going to say anything to the boy about it. She doesn't. Then, suddenly, the smaller kids realize that there is only one of him and lots of them, so they gang up on him.

The mom leaves the conversation in midsentence and goes running over to protect her boy. She shouts at the other children for ganging up on one kid and for being too rough, and bundles her son into her arms. He starts to sniffle and whine a little bit. This is for her benefit, it seems, since he was totally fine before she ran over, even while the littler kids were beating up on him. In fact, the psychologist thought that the boy may have even liked the other kids ganging up on him, because it gave him a chance to fight them more aggressively.