Would you have your five year old firebug fake arrested?
May 21, 2010 News
Your five-year-old starts trying to set things in his room on fire. You try various punishments, but they have no effect. Eventually he successfully sets a book on fire and you know you need to do something drastic. So, you ask your friend the Sheriff to pretend to arrest your son and try to scare him. He gets handcuffed (and they slip right off because dude, he’s five and tiny), he gets put in the back of the car, he cries. And of course, someone takes a picture of all this and it becomes a media storm.
While I’d love to ask this mother why there are still matches and lighters in the house when her son is exploring his exciting new hobby, I like what she did. I have a feeling I’m in the minority though.
Sometimes you have to take drastic measures to get through to kids. We’re not talking about hitting a sibling, the kid was playing with fire. Five-year-olds don’t understand the seriousness of what they’re doing most of the time, not from talking anyway. Bringing him to a burn unit probably would do it for an older kid, but not for a five-year-old. You’ve got to show what would happen to him, which I think this mom did brilliantly.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and the NYC Moms Blog.
Bullying is different these days
Apr 9, 2010 News
This is why I shouldn’t check the news online before I go to bed. I have to be up in about five hours, and instead of sleeping I’m sitting here writing and fuming.
It seems like I may have been the last one to hear about this, since it happened almost a week ago. I had been loosely following the story of Constance McMillen, a senior in a Mississippi high school who was suing her school district to be allowed to attend her prom wearing a tux, with her girlfriend. I guess in Mississippi being gay is still a big deal. Sometimes living in NYC gives you blinders and you forget that there are still places in the U.S. that would actively try to exclude someone from something because she happens to be gay. Then you poke around online and discover that it’s not just a few places, and you curl into a ball with your remote control and put on The Daily Show and rock yourself to sleep to the sweet sound of Jon Stewart making sense. But I digress…
Rather than let her attend her prom the way she wanted to, her school canceled the prom. Because apparently the only thing scarier than drunk pimply heterosexuals dirty dancing in skanky dresses is someone wanting to do the same basic thing but in a way that Jesus told you wasn’t kosher (something he probably wouldn’t have done, but one rant at a time). So with the help of the ACLU, she won her court case…sort of. The judge stopped short of forcing the school district to reinstate the prom, because it was the court’s understanding that parents had organized a prom for the kids. So, problem solved, right? Not so much. If this had been a movie, the students would have rallied around their classmate and stood up to the big bad school district and said “We love her for who she is, and we want her at our prom!” But they hadn’t done that at all. So it’s really no surprise that when it came time for them to invite Constance to the prom, they apparently invited her to a fake one. Constance, her girlfriend, a couple of learning-disabled students, and a handful of other kids – I’m guessing none of them were cheerleaders or football players – all showed up at a country club, while the “real” prom happened somewhere else. Gawker has apparently tracked down pictures from the other prom, so it looks like this really happened.
And nobody can seem to figure out how this would have happened without the parents knowing about it. Or possibly being the driving force behind it.
It makes me sick, and it brings me back to grade school, where kids could often be cruel. I was in a weird position of being the least popular kid in the popular group. So I would get shit on by them, and I’d turn around and make fun of the kids I thought were below me. I remember one time my mom and aunt were driving me to a birthday party. I was really excited, and I had wrapped the gift really carefully, and when I walked up to the house I could hear laughing and talking from inside. Then I rang the bell, and everything went silent. I rang again, nothing. I banged on the door, nothing. I started to wonder if I really had heard anything – maybe I had imagined it in my excitement? So after a few minutes I walked back to my aunt’s car and told her and my mom that my friends must have left for the movie already. We were all supposed to go see Footloose, but I could’ve sworn it didn’t start until much later.
I didn’t show how upset I was, that would have been humiliating. I just shrugged and said “Oh well” and I don’t really remember what happened after that. I probably went up to my room and cried. I’m sure I asked them about it in school on Monday, but I don’t remember what they said. If they were laughing about it, I doubt if it ever went further than that small group of girls. And that’s the difference between bullying then and bullying now. Then, even though it was absolutely embarrassing, it was a word-of mouth, note passing from kid to kid kind-of thing. And when the mean girls had had their fun they moved onto something else and that was that.
It didn’t live forever in text messages and facebook posts and tweets and cell phone pictures. There were no court cases. Do you have any idea how much courage it must have taken for Constance to take that fight in front of her school, and then to court? To stand up in front of the world and say “These kids don’t like who I am, and they’re trying to take something from me, and it’s wrong.” I couldn’t even admit it to my mother in the privacy of a car!
Being a teenager sucks. Being a teenager who is different sucks squared. And bullies today have weapons at their disposal that we didn’t have when we were kids. Nobody has to like everybody, God knows I don’t. But an organized campaign to humiliate someone is just plain wrong. What these kids are feeling – on both sides – isn’t much different than when I was their age, half a lifetime ago. But our power was limited. Smear campaigns took real work. Now it’s as easy as pressing some computer keys. Nobody had to actively hide the real prom’s info from Constance, they just had to make sure not to include her on an email thread or not accidentally friend her on facebook.
I read some stories about bullies and I ask myself if the parents really knew what was going on. I give them the benefit of the doubt. I know that it can be hard to draw the line when it comes to a child’s privacy and behavior. But – with the possible exception of Footloose, which it took me a long time to see because I was bitter – kids can’t organize a prom by themselves. And they especially can’t exclude the person at the center of a media storm without everyone involved noticing.
So I’m not going to mince words: the parents involved are terrible, awful people who should get down on their knees in front of Constance and the other kids from the fake prom and beg their forgiveness. Then they should make their kids do the same. Then they should apologize to their kids for raising such homophobic mean-spirited narrow-minded brats in the first place, and showing off their parenting deficiencies to the world. Then they should spend the rest of their lives trying to dig themselves out of the massive karmic hole they now stand neck-deep in.
The tiny sliver of light in this whole thing? I suspect Constance is going to be OK. She’s already shown a tremendous amount of courage in standing up to these bullies, and was able to at least be happy in the fact that the kids at the fake prom had a great time. So there’s that. But the rest of it makes me sick.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and the NYC Moms Blog.
Tags: Constance McMillen, fake prom, lesbian
Swim school makes headlines for letting kids compete
Aug 7, 2009 News
I should be in bed right now. But I forgot to do laundry earlier in the day. I had plenty of chances. I knew that The Ass was out of undershirts. The laundry was already sorted and it would have taken only a minute to start the load. But I never got around to it. Until 1am. And so, here I am, reading Fark at 2 in the morning, waiting to put the laundry in the drier so that I don’t get woken up in five hours when The Ass can’t find it in the washing machine.
But I didn’t post to bitch about laundry. I’m posting to bitch about stupid grown-ups. A swim school in Australia has made headlines because they’re going to hold an event where kids swim against each other. Where there will be winners and losers. The fact that this is at all notable is just sad.
I remember winning a bronze medal when I was on the swim team in 7th grade. I won a silver in 8th grade. I was a good swimmer. I pretty much sucked at every other sport. I was only played in vollyball when we were ahead by so much that we couldn’t lose or behind by so much that we couldn’t win. I’m not sure if my softball team, the Buccaneers, ever won a game.
Winning felt great. Losing didn’t. I needed to experience both, so that I could learn how to handle both.
Know what sucks more than losing? Not losing until you’re an adult and have no fucking idea how to handle it.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Australia, Kids, self esteem, swimming
