Parenting
fromSlate Magazine
3 days agoMy Son and His Friends Made a Gross Bet. I'm Livid.
Parents should address immature sexual attitudes in 13-year-olds through open dialogue rather than isolating them from peers or involving other families.
The Missing Social Unit From middle school onward, American children don't belong to a "class" in any stable sense. They move continuously - subject to subject, room to room, teacher to teacher. There's extensive discourse around respect, equity, and inclusion. But there's remarkably little structured attention to the actual social life of any group. Because there isn't really a group.
Everyone talks about "teaching moments" these days, those reframes of a shared experience that retroactively rescue what would otherwise have been a feel-bad moment or awkward encounter and turn it into something positive, and for which you're almost grateful. Still, most teaching moments are fraught with the best of intentions but the lousiest of outcomes-lessons in how to lecture, bore, and patronize your child at the same time.
A new study conducted by Ireland's Economic & Social Research Institute found that while bullying remained a pretty ubiquitous experience for teens, most of them chose not to tell an adult. Why not? Well, most of the time they didn't perceive what was being done to them as bullying, so when asked if they'd ever been bullied, they'd naturally say no.