The story is about a woman who organises her school reunion for a TV show, no the next paragraph is not about me organising my own school reunion...
1. Because the people I want to be friends with from school, I still am.
2. Because I don't think that anyone from my year has done anything that amazing that I want to scream excitedly for them (unless one of my class has married Johnny Depp.)
3. Because these days we have Facebook to snoop on people that we don't want to have a conversation with but still want to see what they are up to.
However back to the book and the paragraph which struck me...
'Fifteen years ago, bullying was seen as a fact of school life. All of us have a responsibility to change that attitude forever. And I hope if I ever come across Stacey, (the bully) whatever she is doing now, we could shake hands and work together to make sure bullying is consigned to the history books, where it belongs.'
Read the first scentence again:
'...bullying was seen as a fact of school life.'
Is it not though? Instead of sugar coating the world for our children, should we not be admitting to them that the world is not a nice place and bullying is a fact of not just school life but of general life?
I have been the bullied and the bully. I have had some not very nice things done to me and I have been responsible for doing some not very nice things to someone else but who walks out of school and lives the rest of their life having never been bullied again?
There are bully's at work, on the tube, on the bus, pushing past you in queues.
Should we be saying to our children that in reality, there are some not very nice people out there and they may be being not very nice to someone else but it is a part of life.
I'm not saying that if you believe your child is a bully that you should encourage them, I am saying that we need to educate our children on how to deal with these situations.
If you think your child is a bully then ask them how they would feel if they were being bullied and make then understand that is is not acceptable.
If you think your child is being bullied, talk to them or get them to write it down and encourage them to stand up for themselves.
Get some books or search the internet together and research bullying but all the while I would keep on emphasising that there are horrible people in the world but there is more to life than bully's and bullying.
Is there a new hobby you could do with your child whether they are the bullied or the bully, to distract them and to get them to focus on positive things in life?
When Scarlett told me that a boys threw a glove at her and her friends and she told me she was going to fight them, I told her they were just silly boys trying to get attention and to walk away and play somewhere else as some people are just not nice. We then talked about the good things that had happened that day and what we were going to do at the weekend.
While it broke my heart that some kid was being horrible to my little girl (and my immediate reaction was to go to the school and grab the little rat by the ear and give him what for) I wanted her to understand that these things happen but it's not the end of the world and we have far more important things to do than worry about some silly boy's.
Bullying sucks and in an ideal world it wouldn't happen but unfortunately I don't think it will ever be 'consigned to the history books' but it doesn't have to be the end of the world.
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