Care & Feeding: Theresa the Bully

[minoanmiss]

My son will be in second grade next year. Our elementary school is small and there are only two classes for every grade level. In kindergarten, he had a classmate “Theresa,” who bullied him and also other kids. It was very hard to get help from teachers and the administration about this because Theresa is mildly autistic and is part of the special needs program. But name-calling, hitting, and making up mean stories have nothing to do with autism. For first grade, I was able to get a promise that my son and Theresa would be in separate classrooms. My son has thrived and made friends and did great this year. He still saw Theresa at lunch and recess, and she was still mean to him, but it sounds like he had friends around him to make it easier, and his first grade teacher intervened much more firmly than they did in kindergarten. Now that the school year is over, I made a request to keep them separated next year. The principal said she would not promise anything, and that enough time had passed that she didn’t see it as an issue. From parent gossip, I’ve learned that other parents have also tried to separate their kids from Theresa, which is probably why I’m getting pushback. I’m so frustrated. My son cried multiple times a week in kindergarten, and it took a lot of effort to bring him back from hating school last year to successfully making friends and enjoying activities this year. What do I do?

—Don’t Break What’s Working! <

Dear Don’t Break,

First: I’m not sure you’re the best judge of what does and does not “have to do” with autism. Second: I implore you to step back a bit and try to see the big picture. Multiple parents are begging the school to keep Theresa, a child, isolated from their children. Whatever the root causes of this child’s behavior, she is troubled and in pain. What is it you would have the principal do? Keep Theresa in a room of her own? Keep her only among children whose parents haven’t noticed that she’s struggling and lashing out?

I’m not suggesting I don’t understand your focus on keeping your child safe and happy. But when the issue is another child the same age—yes, even when that other child is “mean”—your wish for your child’s happiness shouldn’t come at the other child’s expense. That would be a cruelty much greater than Theresa’s. Unlike her, you’re a full-grown adult who should know better.

Besides: A second grader isn’t a kindergartener. Naturally, you should continue to be attentive to how he’s feeling as the new school year begins. But keep in mind that he will be much better equipped this coming year to handle Theresa’s behavior toward him (as he exhibited at lunch and recess in first grade) and that the second grade teacher will be better prepared—because there’s now two years’ worth of information—for possible problems that may require a teacher’s intervention. And it’s not so terrible for your child to learn strategies for dealing with people he finds difficult or even painful to be around (he will be having to do this his whole life, as we all do)—in fact, schooling at this age isn’t only about learning language arts and math and science (etc.) skills; it’s also about learning social and interpersonal skills of all kinds. And then there are the lessons you will be teaching him: about resilience, inclusion, empathy, and not running away from problems.

—Michelle

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I dunno. LW's complaint is not that Theresa is autistic, or even something she can't control like being allergic -- LW's complaint is about Theresa's actions, about [the school doing nothing to prevent] Theresa bullying her son. Not least because I have been a child deployed for the benefit of other children, I wouldn't exactly jump at the chance to let my child be a punching bag for another's benefit. (and as I mentioned in brackets, what is the school doing about Theresa's behavior?!)

[viggorlijah]

My kid was bullied and changed schools mostly due to that. At the next school a violent bullying kid was in her class but the school made serious efforts to safely include him and manage his behaviour so that the other kids felt safe speaking up when he was bullying them and knew what was just get along with weird behaviour versus unsafe behaviour. I was worried a lot at first but then my kid would talk about how the teachers and classmates handled him and she felt safer about both her own quirks as a neurodiverse kid being accepted and about the school being a safe place because this very difficult kid was still included as best as possible and the school showed actively that they were listening to kids. He also made significant progress over the next couple of years.

Abusive kids deserve school too. It’s a lot more work but the end result benefits all the kids.

[minoanmiss]

This is 1 excellent 2 should be SOP 3 rarer than hens teeth. Sigh.

[ambyr]

Yes, Michelle seems to be eliding the part where Theresa is hitting is son.

It's true that for our entire lives we have to deal with the risk that people might hit us, but the strategy I and most adults practice for dealing with this is to do everything we can to avoid people who've assaulted us in the past. Not wanting to be in a classroom with someone who hits you isn't "running away from problems."

[cereta]

It does bother me that we routinely expect children to deal with behavior, verbal and physical, that if perpetrated by an adult on another adult, would result in everything from at best disciplinary action to at worst to being criminally prosecuted. Note: I am definitely not calling for intervention by the police or the juvenile justice system, both of which are highly likely to make the situation worse. But I've seen, and personally experienced, adults putting the onus on the kids to "work out" one child hitting another, verbally abusing another, or outright harassing the other. And unlike adults, kids don't have the only real weapon we have against regular abusive behavior: leaving, whether that means leaving the room or even leaving the home/workplace. All of which is to echo: what is the school doing about Theresa's behavior?

[green_grrl]

Not much, if things were still the same at recess and lunch. Is Theresa not getting any special behavioral education as part of her autism diagnosis?

[cimorene]

Yeah, this is the responsibility of the school, to figure out how to handle it. I know managing and restraining bullying is notoriously hard and there's no magic solution, but just saying you hope it won't be a problem isn't going to cut it. Giving it another chance is fair after a year, but I don't like the tone here that the parent is being blamed for valid and reasonable concerns.

[teaotter]

What is it you would have the principal do? Keep Theresa in a room of her own? Keep her only among children whose parents haven’t noticed that she’s struggling and lashing out?

How about: keep her from hitting the other kids? Is that really too much to ask?

schooling at this age isn’t only about learning language arts and math and science (etc.) skills; it’s also about learning social and interpersonal skills of all kinds.

Interpersonal skills like: what to do when the adults around them can't be trusted? What solution are the kids supposed to find that the teacher can't?

This is such a bad answer. The school lost the parents' trust by failing to protect their children, failing to help Theresa, and failing to communicate about what was going on. Why should LW trust them now? Has anything changed? Because if the principal's whole argument is "look, time has passed, surely we won't have the same problem again," they're not trying very hard to get that trust back, either.

[lilysea]

yes, there needs to be a solution

1. it is not fair to expect the children to put up with Theresa hitting them

2. it is not safe FOR THERESA to let her hit the other children, because eventually one of the other children will hit back in retaliation, and they might use a ruler/pencil/pen, so she might get a significant injury to the face/eyes

[azurelunatic]

So this sounds like it's time to get together with the other parents whose children were targets of Theresa's bullying and start making pointed requests of the principal.

So, maybe starting the year by isolating Theresa from the schoolmates she's bullied in the past is a non-starter with this principal. Okay. So what is the plan if Theresa calls your kid a nasty name? What is the plan if Theresa persists with name-calling? "Persists" would look like any of: stopping one day but resuming the next day, picking a different name for the same student, picking a new student to call names. What is the plan if Theresa makes up mean stories about your kid? What about if she persists? What is the plan if she hits another student in a way that is clearly deliberate and unprovoked? (What is the plan for determining whether Theresa is provoked into a meltdown vs. makes an active choice to use violence outside of a situation where others aren't giving her space that she needs?) And so on for all the specific forms of bullying she's carried out in the past, and a general sense of what's going to happen if she invents new ways to make her classmates miserable. Clearly there will be some details of the plan that will (and should) remain private between the school, Theresa's parents, and Theresa, but as the parents of a student who was a target of Theresa's bad behavior in the past, I think you (and the other parents in your situation) have standing to demand some answers, and you may be able to force the issue by working together.

[minoanmiss]

You deserve whatever Michelle got paid for her non answer.

[azurelunatic]

Theresa's teacher should not assume that the kids are starting with a full blank slate. Teachers and administrations really, really want to do this but in a case with bullying that has persisted for two school years so far, that's a really bad idea. Theresa's teacher will probably need a list of the kids who Theresa has targeted, ranked from worst to least-worst, and should make up the seating chart so that Theresa is not seated near kids who she has a history of bullying. If it's unavoidable, that's what the badness ranking is for. Second grade probably won't be doing formal Group Projects, but Theresa should not be working closely with kids she's bullied for any length of time.

Weirdly, the hitting thing is the one that I think has the potential to be actually autism related, because if even one sense is in a state of overwhelm and someone who doesn't know how to regulate is being crowded, sometimes they will make space for themselves in whatever way they can. Theresa honestly may need an aide monitoring the situation and defusing things before she has a meltdown, and helping her learn how to regulate before things get too bad. But this letter has nowhere near the level of detail for a bystander to figure out the further circumstances around the hitting. And in any event that sort of thing is beyond this parent's realm of authority or need to know.

My little nephew came home from school (first grade or kindergarten) one day with a fantastic bruise on one leg. I asked how he'd got it. He said, cheerfully, that a specific kid (one of his friends) had kicked him. I was furious and wanted to march right down to school to bend the teacher's ear about the situation, but he was too cheerful for me to think it was an act of meanness. So I asked him what was happening before his friend kicked him. Turns out it was a missed kick in a recess game of some soccer-adjacent sport. At that point I calmed back down.

[lunabee34]

My kid was relentlessly bullied by another kid for a couple of years and made miserable.

As you all have pointed out, this answer is bullshit.

[joyeuce]

My daughter had a "Theresa" when she was 7 or 8. When I spoke to the school about it, I said I didn't know how much they could do because, as everyone knew, Theresa was having a really hard time (her mother had been killed in a road accident about a year earlier). School said yes, she is having a hard time, and we are supporting her and her family through that as best we can, but we will not take that as an excuse for hurting other children, and this is what we are going to do about it. And they did it. I loved that school.

[melannen]

I read the reply and was like, "wait, where's the rest of it?"

I think there is a distinct difference between "My kid is being targeted and ostracized by bullying" and "there is a mean kid everybody including my kid dislikes who lashes out and sometimes hurts people" and it's really hard to tell which is which, especially if you're basing it all on five-year-olds' emotional skills. If she's still hitting people at age 8 and her mean stories get listened to and believed, then that's a serious problem. If she's still mean and bad at social things but not hitting people anymore and all the other kids hate her and know she lies and ignore her, that's a very different situation.

[movingfinger]

Theresa is a bully. Michelle is an idiot.

[firecat]

Most parents don’t care two hoots about intervening in bullying. If MULTIPLE parents are BEGGING, there’s a problem the school administrators need to address. They’re the ones “running away from the problem,” not the LW’s son.

I was left to myself to deal with bullies (“just ignore them” is OK as far as it goes, but that isn’t particularly far) and suddenly the adults were shocked, shocked that I hit a bully in the face with my backpack. (Multiple adults were standing around ignoring the bullying until that happened.) I know “standing up to your bullies” by using physical violence is a rite of passage in Amurrica, but it’s just crappy to leave kids feeling like they have no other options.

And if Teresa is lashing out so much, it’s likely because the environment is bad for her too. Maybe she *would* do better in a room of her own. At the very least someone should offer her some options.

[conuly]

I feel bad for Theresa too, but in the meantime there doesn't seem to be a plan to prevent her from being violent at the other students.

[gingicat]

I know from parenting experience that hitting and bullying can absolutely be a sign of being unable to coping with multiple inputs. Does the school not have the option of even half-decent therapists and a half-decent classroom for kids who need extra support? "Mild" autism can often mean "ABA taught me to mask but not how to cope."

[minoanmiss]

Yep. By abandoning Theresa to her frustrations the school is failing her, as well as hee classmates.