During the class discussion today, all of the bullying and victim issues were placed only on the schools shoulders. None of the groups came up with ways in how parents should help out or be responsible. As tragic as the case of Phoebe Price is, it does bring about issues that have been going on in schools for a very long time. This girls received endless harassment on and off school grounds. Yet, all the articles are only talking about what the school should have done, and discussing ways in which the schools had the possibility of preventing this. In my personal opinion, I do think that the school officials did have a responsibility for what happened, but I also believe that the parents had a major contributing factor too.
When I was growing up, I was not allowed to have a social web site page that my Mom was not able to continually monitor. As for a cell phone, my Mom read through my text messages on a nightly basis, and she would make sure I was not deleting any on my phone by double checking the bill. At the time, I thought she was horribly strict, and I did not like her getting involved in my personal business. As I got further into high school, there were quite a few suicides. I do not really know if these happened from bullying, but I realized that my Mom was just doing all those things to keep an eye out on me.
When suicides are happening involving minors due to bullying and teasing, I often wonder how their parents were involved. There should be some kind of information available for parents from the schools on the best ways to monitor for bullying, and if their child is getting bullied on the best ways to discuss it with their child. In addition, I do think that parents should have the option of doing the school vouchers if their child is the victim of chronic bullying. Obviously, a lot has to be done in order to change bullying behaviors from all sides. I do think that there has not been much discussion about the parent's involvement in the media, and it seems to me like the media only expects the solutions to come from the schools.
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Ashley,
ReplyDeleteThis is a good post. I find myself asking the same question, Where are the parents and what are they doing about the problem. We as a society want to place all of the blame on the institutions instead of taking some of the responsibility ourselves. I can appriciate what your mother was doing with your cell phone and not allowing you to be on any social web pages as you were growing up, as a parent myself. I have a daughter, she is a little young for me to have to worry about any of this right now, but you can bet that I will be doing the same thing to her. As a parent I want to know what is going on with her. I am always asking questions about her from her day care providers. Like, is she acting out in any way or does she throw any tantrums while she is there. I think that it is my responsibility to know these things and to do something about the if they are occuring. Again thank you for the good post.
Keith Lopez
You do make a really good point. Parents should be held more responsible. As you said about Phoebe Price, her parents did nothing to help her, and neither did the school. So in my opinion they are both equally responsible for what happened.
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