Full disclosure: My 13-year-old son served a one-day in-school suspension this week. His crime? Fighting. Sort of.
Yes, he physically tackled another kid in gym class, and no, the class topic was not football. Class hadn’t even started yet when another boy—who, I later learned, has been harassing my kid for months—grabbed the hat off my son’s head and started playing Monkey in the Middle with it. My normally mild-mannered son had enough. He tackled the hat stealer. The hat stealer responded in kind, and both boys were rolling around on the floor when the gym teacher entered the room.
Ironically, at about the same time, I wrote these words as I struggled to comprehend the Nevada school shooting:
Are we, the adults, perhaps unintentionally contributing to school shootings by restricting all forms of physical fighting? Would letting kids solve problems physically, at times, keep things from simmering to the extent that they explode in a hail of bullets?
My son wasn’t the first and won’t be the last kid suspended for fighting—or, to put it more accurately, for fighting back. Last April, a nine-year-old Colorado boy was suspended for beating up his bully. (Like my son, the Colorado boy served the exact same sentence as his bully, a one-day suspension.) In Texas, a 13-year-old boy was suspended for two days, sent to alternative school, and prohibited from marching with the band after he pushed and hit a school bully. In each of these cases, school officials cited zero tolerance and anti-bullying policies to defend the boys’ punishment.
I get it: We don’t want kids hitting each other. We want kids to solve their problems with words, so we teach them conflict resolution skills and instruct them to seek help from a teacher or other adult if their words aren’t enough to stop the bullying.
But here’s the thing: Kids don’t trust us to solve the problem, and most growing boys desperately want to be viewed as competent men. In boy world, asking a teacher or mommy or daddy to solve your problem is akin to publicly admitting weakness. And the one thing academic research has shown over and over again is that perceived weakness makes kids vulnerable to bullying.
Listen, I believe that teaching emotional intelligence—how to feel and positively handle emotions—is an important part of bullying prevention. But building kids’ self-esteem and simply talking about anti-bullying strategies is not enough. Research (and common sense) has shown that there’s an “inconsistent empirical basis” for comprehensive anti-bullying policies. In other words, the anti-bullying policies practiced in most schools might work, at best. Smart researchers, noting the strong link between perceived weakness and bullying, have even suggested that “interventions involving physical education instructors toward physical fitness might reduce physical victimization,” while noting “one should be careful to deliver the message that assertive, not aggressive, defense is the goal.”
It might not be PC to say so, but some research even suggests that boys who respond to bullying in teacher- and school-approved ways—by seeking assistance from a teacher, for instance—are actually more likely to be bullied. Other research suggests that “fighting back” is a sign of emotional maturity. Common sense (and, sadly, personal experience) tells many people that prohibiting kids from fighting back is the same as teaching them to tolerate abuse.
October is National Bullying Prevention Month. This October, I challenge you to think about what to do when prevention hasn’t worked. When bullying is active and escalating, is it ever OK for kids to fight back?
Do you know someone who’s been punished for fighting back? Did you ever fight back against a bully?
Jennifer L.W. Fink is the founder of BuildingBoys.net, a website that helps parents, educators, and communities build healthy boys.