"Do you know why I called you here, Mrs. Sweeney?"
"Nope, can't say I do," she answered Principal Hanford absently, checking her iPhone for messages.
"We've heard from several of Cameron's classmates that he's bullying them, taking their lunches - that sort of thing."
"Not my Cameron," Mirabelle Sweeney stated flatly. "They were probably just goofing around."
"We don't tolerate bullies, Mrs. Sweeney. Since Cameron just started here, we wanted you to know."
"It's just his harmless way of making friends," she responded airily. "By the way, you do know we're donating the new lights for the athletic field, right?
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8 comments:
Great use of the word...I imagine we all know parents like that!
Very timely topic given the situations broadcast on the news over the past few years. Good job. Made me want to smack that parent myself!
I see parents like that at my kids schools all the time. Its just so sad. Well done.
Priceless. Sadly there are too many parents with this same attitude.
awww man! Entitlement issues give me heartburn. Great capture!
So many parents enable bad behavior and then wonder later "why is this happening???"
Ditto to all the above comments. Great job.
I used to think parents were to blame for their bullying kids, in a very direct way. But I'm not so sure it's malicious as much as it's miscomprehension in some cases.
Kids naturally form hierarchies and it takes consistent guidance for them to be more egalitarian. So bullying, in a sense, is part of the "natural order" of things.
What we've done is created an unnatural context where that plays out. We evolved to live in smallish tribes, with adults and children co-existing together. This weird segregation we've created, where kids all of the same age spend all day with one another...for good or bad, it's a situation that's ripe for bullying to happen given our nature.
I've watched the kids I grew up with who were bullies and now have children of their own. They don't consider their kids bullies, nor do they "teach" bullying...what they DO teach their kids is how to be "on top". And since they themselves were "on top" as kids, they just can't even really comprehend that this could be perceived as bullying, nor what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it.
Anyway, tangent there. Good piece. :P
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