Keep Your Kids Talking to You

Originally Posted July 7, 2012

We all know mean, nasty, grumpy, temperamental people of all ages. We get used to it, come to expect that we'll have to share the planet with these folks. But when kids encounter them for the first time, it’s a bit of a shocker. They can't figure out what they did to deserve such treatment, they think it's their fault, some feel helpless as to what they can do to make it stop. Making sure our kids talk to us about these kinds of things is paramount. When they don't talk about it, when they stay quiet, put up with it alone, don't ask for help - that's when the real trouble starts, the kind of trouble that left unresolved is what hurts some kids so deeply that some feel their only escape is a drastic, permanent one. 

My daughter has had an ongoing situation with a girl and her crew at school. We tried various ways to resolve it but the school told the kids to "just get along" and the parents said we were lying about their daughter's behaviour. So we advised our daughter to stay clear, take the high road and keep us posted. It was annoying and hurtful but never a big enough deal to make Clancy not want to go to school. She had other pals and most days passed without drama.

A few months ago, however, I knew something was up. Clancy wasn’t herself and when I asked what was up she said; “Nothing.” I waited and that evening she and I were sitting on the couch reading our books when she asked if God could hear our thoughts. The conversation unfolded to reveal that she thought maybe she wouldn’t get into heaven because she had been having bad thoughts. She said she had wanted to tell me but felt so awful about it she just couldn’t. She went on to explain that she was tired off the girls teasing her and had fantasized about their leader falling and breaking a nail. I explained that no god would consider her thoughts evil enough to refuse to let her into to his place.

We talked about everyone having bad thoughts from time to time, what it means to not act on them, the fact that she was a good candidate for heaven but she told me that she thought she was changing at her core and her feelings of anger were going to make her become mean like these other girls. This pissed me off. Between what I was thinking about the school's administration and the mother, there was no way I was getting into heaven.

I assured her that even though she felt angry, which was normal, she wasn't mean and never would be. Eventually she did feel better. I asked her to remember she can always come to me, that there is nothing she could ever do or say that would lose her my love and that she had to promise that as she got older and the problems got bigger that she would always come to me, even when she thought I was the dumbest woman on the planet she still had to give me a shot.

She asked me to get the video camera, this is something they do every now and again. They like to make a video to leave for their “bigger selves”. A video time capsule of something they want to remember. So Clancy wanted something to remind her older self to always let mom help.

The Dana Clancy mentions in the video is Dana Kerford, founder of a beautiful  program for girls called Girl Power. Click here for more.

And what became of the situation at school? 

Since talking to the kid’s mother had never worked I decided instead to move the target from my daughter to myself. I wrote the mother an email detailing what I, and the other parents, had witnessed her daughter doing. I figured since she had always claimed her kid was blameless the letter would infuriate her and she would admonish her kid to stay away from mine so that I could never say I Told You So.

It worked. Clancy enjoyed drama-free days at school. And the mother, well, she called me names on facebook and the husband called me names in an email. Proving the point and making it plain to see where their kid had learned to call her classmates “dorks” and “stupid”.