We are living in the age of Oprah, in which people have hyper-tuned their feelings so as to be offended, hurt or victimized by things people wouldn’t have batted an eyelash at forty years ago. Better knock off the teasing. People take themselves very seriously these days. Besides, I feel the dark shadow of anti-teasing legislation closing in on us. On the other hand, could some posters be confusing teasing with assault and battery?

Students, not so much.

Teasing may be common in your circle but not everyone teases. There are better ways to handle the feelings that lead to teasing. Children who learn those better ways are not being coddled, they are being armed. I know a number of children educated at home who have never been teased and am confident that when they do encounter it later in life, they will not tolerate it.

I have, as an adult, been victimized by people (ie: employers) who have power to hurt people unchecked–and I am better off when our relationship ends. From this, I can try to teach my one child–who is a virtual lightening rod, ways to avoid victimization. But that is not the way that I choose to operate when I am in a position of responsibility for children. Children deserve to know that there are other ways of operating in groups, that we live in a society that grants rights to those who are among the least able to defend themselves–and do so out of a belief system that is good. They need to know that certain behaviors are NOT just the way that people are, that there are things that can be done. I don’t know that jb envisions when s/he speaks of what authority figures do–but I suspect that this vision exists within the paradigm of those with the most power rule (sort of) and that the way that someone would seek to teach something other than harassing behavior would be through some authoritarian system of punishing the bad kids.

Just as we don’t teach multiplication or spelling by punishing or excluding the kids who make mistakes, we don’t teach respect by punishing the kids who follow bad examples. We teach them the right way.

I wonder why people think that their children can or should be protected from life. They must not be exposed to anything that “hurts” them in any way. I joke about parent’s covering their children in bubble wrap to prevent them from hurting themselves when they go outside to play. I guess now they are also going to have to stuff their children’s ears with cotton to prevent them from hearing anything that hurts their feelings. Being teased and teasing others is a normal way that children and adults interact with one another. There is nothing wrong with it and it is not the same as bullying.

The good stuff I learned? Being bullied really, really sucks, so it’s best to be compassionate to those around you, especially those below you on the “pecking order.”

I am not sure that the good stuff totally outweighs the bad.

To this day I have a very hard time separating “kindly” teasing from “hostile” teasing, because so much of my experience of it as a kid was hostile. (In my family, we didn’t really tease, so I had no “inoculation” there)

There is a grain of truth to what the quoted psychologist says, but it’s unfair to leave kids totally defenseless. We need to help kids acquire the skills they need to handle teasing. Jim Fay has a great article on teaseproofing kids here: http://www.loveandlogic.com/pages/teaseproof.html