There is a pink sunrise coming up over the familiar horizon.
As parents and grandparents, coaches and teachers get their little charges ready for the fresh new day, pause to think about what lessons you will impart to your little bully, little bystander or little target.
It's a promise that boy or girl, teen or tot, your child is one of those and so are you.
Children (even the adult ones) learn what they experience. It is a principal built into the motto - "Learn to Do By Doing" - of the 4-H Club of Canada. Founded 100 years ago, it was understood even then that people learn best through participation. Adults are there to guide young ones not away from or around an experience but stand alongside them as they personally go through it.
It is also why the Scout and Guide movements, formed together in 1907, are based on youths earning badges for accomplishing tasks, not merely reading about it.
The oldest and most common youth group is called "the family" and the next is called "the community" and no one is exempt from membership. There are few badges, but there are scars and memories and subconscious beliefs acquired along the way.
Being in the room observing mom and dad, friends and neighbours, any configuration of domestic life, is not a passive activity. Children are "doing" those moments alongside you when you slam the door, or lay a guilt trip, or refuse to compromise, or laugh at someone's misfortune, or yell at the ref, or...
That child in your life is learning about abuse - inviting it, enabling it, inflicting it, or healing it - every time there is a conflict in their purview. The teaching is equal if the adults involved take a swing, or stay their hand; if you assert your position and leave it at that, or totally turtle under the other's pressure, or force your will. Each choice you make is a lesson they have just learned.
As an actor in our city, Michael Armstrong is used to being evaluated by viewers. The star of Theatre North West's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and Judy Russell's "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum" cast off his characters this week during a Facebook conversation started by Patrick Stewart. The icon of stage and screen - Capt. Jean Luc Picard himself - disclosed his own childhood observations of his dad whacking around his mom.
"This is also my experience, Patrick," said Armstrong. "I inherited my own father's violent temper and have struggled all my life to cope with it, to mediate it. His was alcohol fueled. Mine was learned. It is a cyclical, generational issue and the truth is the only way through it."
If you follow that path of truth down its side roads, you will find children learning how to be victims, or bystanders, or the bullies themselves from the scenarios that play out in front of them every day. Maybe it is a recurring story, maybe it is a one-time event, but the ears and eyes collect it for future reference.
(In any of these scenarios, the genders could be reversed.) Perhaps it is the dad who doesn't assert his right to be forever unslapped by his wife; maybe it's the mom who promises to leave the violence but never does; perhaps it is the in-laws and neighbours and grandparents who do nothing to intervene. The kids learn, too, from the coach who fosters bad blood between players, and from the teacher who throws books in disciplinarian frustration. They learn from the TV show or video game depicting sexism and violence and intolerance without you providing any counter-context. They learn from those who declare disdainful things "gay" without anyone correcting the harmful term.
They learn equally if you add two words to these scenarios: "or not." Each of these moments is saturated with the possibility of making a positive advancement or reinforcing a dark perception rooted in shallow fear and simple ignorance (aka lack of that experience).
Mistakes are inevitable for all of us and some adults will ration their responsibilities (to kids and peers alike) in different proportions. So, bullies will certainly continue to show up on all playgrounds of life. So, too, will those who attract the bully's negative attention, and so, too, will all the people who feel the urge to cheer the bully on or say nothing out of worry that they will be next.
Less than helpful would be putting these various roles in the red glare of judgment or the hot white spotlight of shame. Instead, let us shed a light on bullying that won't hurt the senses - the warm glow of that pink sunrise beginning to brightening our way.
