Kids and Bullies

It’s an unfortunate truth that kids can get bullied or marginalized no matter where you send them to school or how hard you work to protect them from it.

I attended a Baptist K-8 school. Someone close to me was bullied so badly there that she ultimately had to finish her 8th grade year at home via video series. The kids in her class once passed around a list of the girls ranked from prettiest to ugliest. Her name was at the very bottom. At a class pool party, she insecurely entered the hot tub only for everyone to quickly scramble out of it and accuse her of turning the water green. She’s in her 40s now and has done tremendous work to be at peace in her own skin, but it’s been a lifelong struggle, coupled with the comorbidity of childhood sexual trauma. But these are her stories to tell. The point is that wounds like these can leave lifelong scars that dramatically alter the course of a child’s life.

At my private Presbyterian high school, there was one incredibly socially awkward boy in my class of 29. He had a secret history of complex childhood trauma, and back then, no one really had language for autism spectrum disorders, which I’m now 100% certain he had.

One day in class, I watched a jock light this kid’s hair on fire with a blowtorch. The bullied kid now lives in a tent in Portland. He’s had his genitals chopped off, and he identifies as “Christine.” It’s one of the sadder stories I’ve ever encountered.

And of course bullying wasn’t always overt, intentional, or led by the kids. Sometimes it was much more indirect. Sometimes it was ideological in nature.

Now hear me say this: At a Christian school, I expect the students to be taught a Christian worldview and Christian theology. If that’s not what you want for your kids, you should send them elsewhere.

But even within this framework, there can be ideological marginalization and completely unnecessary division. I’m thinking of one assignment in particular where students were required to write an essay either supporting or critiquing the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Everyone knew from the jump that the only way to get an “A” on this assignment was to defend predestination to the death. I’m not sure I know anyone who critiqued it who got higher than a “B.” Maybe some former classmate reading this will correct me, and that’s fine, but the point is that this one assignment created an extremely arrogant, hostile, and divisive culture among students. Those with the temerity to defy the preferred narrative were viewed as lesser Christians. I’ll never forget a certain schoolmate loudly declaring that she would never even consider marrying someone who wasn’t a staunch Calvinist. The milieu was actually really hurtful to a lot of people. I know this because in the 20+ years since I’ve graduated, they’ve told me so. And there was really no use in telling the parents of those affected to complain to the school leadership because the leadership was fully onboard with the problematic ideology in the first place.

So I’m pretty aware of bullying dynamics in the context of schools, and as I raise a son on the autism spectrum, I’ve had to be something of a helicopter parent when it comes to his social interactions. Tristan is a brilliant boy with a heart of gold, but establishing relationships is just friggin hard for him. He doesn’t have a lot of friends. He’s extremely lonely. And when he does manage to find a friend, he can sometimes tend to cling to them like white on rice to the degree that they feel a bit suffocated, and we’ve had to do a lot of coaching around that, too.

Well for the last three years, my kid has had one consistent friend- an equally brilliant girl in his class. Sometimes he plays chess with her at lunch. They connect over their shared love of reading. It’s been comforting for me to know that she’s there.

Well these last few weeks, things have taken a turn in a negative direction. This girl has buddied up with a couple of students who’ve gotten sucked into the social contagion of the gender cult. These girls insist on being referred to as he/him, and they relentlessly badger people who don’t kowtow to their demands.

Tristan has largely adopted the strategy of avoiding pronouns altogether and just uses their names when necessary. But at track practice the other day, he called one of these girls “she” and all hell broke loose. His longtime friend publicly announced that she won’t ever speak to him again if he doesn’t apologize and admit he was wrong. He held his ground and came home really upset.

I tried to give him tools and strategies, but this is a lot for a 14-year-old autistic kid to handle. There’s really no point in telling him to complain to the principal because the principal seems to be fully onboard with the gender cult’s ideology anyway and would likely lecture Tristan about not being a bigot.

So yesterday when I picked him up from his track meet, my daughter informed me that he had been secretly crying in a corner because this girl had once again publicly demanded an apology as a condition to their continued friendship. I asked him how the situation was going.

“I found a solution, Mom,” he said. “I apologized, but I had my fingers crossed behind my back.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. They don’t write instruction manuals for navigating this stuff, guys. I paused.

“That’s not gonna work for your life, buddy,” I finally explained. “Did Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego bow to the idol with their fingers crossed behind their backs?”

He looked down and shook his head.

“How are you going to feel about yourself as a young man if you let people walk all over you and decide what you are allowed to believe?”

“Not good,” he said.

What I wanted to do was to march over to this young bully and have my way with her. If she’s looking for a fight, I’m more than equipped to give her one. But I also know how emasculating it would be to my son if his mommy went in and fought his battle for him, and the optics of a 40-year-old soccer mom taking on a 14-year-old? Not great.

We talked about how hard it is to be lonely and how desperate we can sometimes feel to keep friends even if they’re treating us badly. We talked about how it’s better to be lonely than abused. These are such painful lessons to learn.

“You have to turn around and fix this,” I told him. “We aren’t going home without addressing it.” He looked like he was going to die. “I’m here to help you if you need support.”

We set off in search of this girl, but she was nowhere to be found. But I did find her mom, and I did start an awkward conversation with her because at the end of the day, our kids do still need our help sometimes. Some of this is too heavy for them to carry alone. The conversation was awkward, but I’m cautiously optimistic it will put a boundary on this girl’s ideological tyranny where my son is concerned.

As I was debriefing with my husband later, I muttered something about how this is why all my conservative friends lecture me about how I should have my kids in private school. Tristan overheard me.

“No!” he interjected. “This is the world I live in. I might as well learn to deal with it now instead of later.”

And he’s right. This IS the world in which we live. These are the times and the prevailing ideologies and cognitive distortions, and it’s a battle out there, guys. There are no easy roads or guarantees of pain-free educational experiences.

I pray the following prayer over my kids every day before they go to school:

May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you. May he turn His face toward you and give you peace and keep you safe with His angels.”

Lately I’ve been adding another sentence to the end of the prayer: “And may He give you friends to encourage you along the way.”

If y’all want to join me in that prayer, I sure wouldn’t mind the support. It takes a village.