Kindness is NOT the answer: The problem of bullying (Part 4)

How do we deliver the hard messages with kindness?

Part 4

Read Part 1, 2 and 3 of Kindness is NOT the answer

He is still watching me in the back seat, waiting to see how I will process all this, waiting to see how he must process all of this. I am flooded by sadness and fear that he will continue to have these experiences. I am desperate to end them for him and my answer springs from that. “Babe, maybe you needed to hear all that. Didn’t I tell you last night for the hundredth time that you have to stop being messy. That its unfair to the person looking at your work. I told you I was tired of trying to figure out where your answer were. Did you think about your teacher having to look at that? And sitting in the middle of a hallway at a school? That doesn’t make sense. The teacher was telling you that was stupid thing to do and it is. You could get hurt. Someone barrels into you…” He turns his eyes away from me now. I see his hurt and look back at the road. I can’t stand to see his hurt in the tears cascading down his cheeks as he gulps for breath. I cannot escape it though even when I am staring at the road. I hear those gulps as accusations. I feel what I have done fill the car. It creeps into my body and fills it too. I want to pull the car over and get in the backseat with him and just hold him. I want to unsay everything I have just said. I steel myself though. I am his mother. This is my job. I cannot let him dismiss what these teachers have told him. There are truths in there that he needs to hear, to protect himself. He cannot get so immersed inside moments that he forgets the outside. He cannot be messy and all over the place and make things hard on people and not think about his effect. These are lessons I know he must hear and learn, to make sure that he avoids these hurts in the future, avoids the repercussions of carelessness in this world. It is my job to teach him empathy, to look at it from another’s perspective. I know that while this is painful, it is my job, to teach him painful lessons to guard him from pain in the future but still I wonder….

When he looks back at me, I can see the sadness in his eyes but I see something else, I see betrayal. I see that he cannot make sense of my response. His eyes object. There is something not right about your response, they seem to say. There is something wrong here. I can feel it too. He knew that when he brought me tales of unkindness that children expressed on the playground I would condemn their behavior, empathize with his hurt, applaud his refusal to be unkind in the face of others unkindness and we would laugh about my false promise to redeem him. I could see his eyes asking, why not now? He is right. I know this. I feel it in the pit of my stomach as it knots. I had just excused away their unkindness. I had messed up. I had just justified unkindness, worse, told him he deserved it. He deserved to be ashamed. I confused the messages of the teacher, my messages with their delivery. In my rush to save him from the pain his behavior would bring in the future if he did not learn the lessons, I had excused the delivery of those lessons. Instead of telling him that the delivery was wrong and adults could and did get the delivery wrong all the time, my fear for him not receiving the messages led me to fail to separate for him the truth of the messages and the unkindness of the delivery. My simultaneous desire to make him resilient in the face of unkindness led me to brush over the pain of unkindness, deliver the message that delivery does not matter, he does not have the right to feel the sting of delivery when the message is fair. I had just told him what was I knew to be wrong was maybe right. I had justified myself by justifying those teachers, by understanding those teachers. I had justified all the times I had been unkind because I thought the message riding on shame, brutal, would sink deeper and faster.

We got home and he went to his room and closed the door to announce that I had betrayed him and he would now go into his room, away from me, separate from me, and lay in his bed curled up with that betrayal. He had done this before and later, he would come out, decided about something and resume our relationship as if nothing had happened. When I would try and talk about it later, he would listen to me, not saying anything and then move on. I never know if he is in his room forgiving me for not being right, for betraying him or if he is there looking for what is the message in my betrayal and trying to understand it as something necessary for him to learn.

I go to my room too, accepting our separation, what feels like punishment to me, to think as well. I too think about my betrayal and wonder if I should work to forgive myself for it or look for the message in my betrayal and understand it as something necessary for me to learn. I feel furious with those teachers, furious with their unkindness. I am those teachers. I start to think that perhaps kindness is too much to ask of people. Demanding kindness from my kids, when they see me being unkind to them in moments, to their dad in moments, is it fair? Is kindness a realistic demand on them? Or are we setting everyone up for failure? If I cannot even be kind to my children in each moment, children I would shield from every unkindness in this world if given a choice, how can I expect them to be kind in each moment and expect those in their world to be kind to them in each moment. Kindness is too much, I think. It is an unrealistic burden that no one can carry and not even love can ensure.

What then, if kindness is too much? I had told my son that unkindness was ok but why? I had told him unkindness was ok because I believed he needed to hear the message. I believed that hearing it now would rescue him from far harsher unkindness in the future. But I had rushed my response for so many reasons. I had in my response justified myself by justifying the teachers, believed I was teaching him empathy for others, believed I was saving him, when I was saving myself and all of us who are unkind daily, all of us. His eyes had said to me, “But Mom, you demand kindness from me, all day saying, ‘Be kind. Remember to be kind.’ I go out and try to be kind but you don’t demand that of other people.” He was right. The teachers’ messages had been right but the delivery was unkind. I had delivered those messages in similar ways when I too felt overwhelmed and exasperated but I needed to separate the correctness of a message from the rightness of the delivery. Still, I asked myself, how realistic is it to demand a kind delivery of a message that is harsh but necessary? How do you deliver the message, your behaviors are wrong and unthoughtful and there will be consequences if you do not change them, kindly? And if the goal is to change behavior what is the mechanism of change if it is delivered on kindness?

Isn’t change in humans, instruction on behavior, socialization often built on shame?

Read Part 5 of Kindness is NOT the answer