Bullying – Florida story
I’ve been following the story about the Florida dad who stormed the bus to threaten everyone who was involved in bullying his daughter who has CP. As a parent of a child who has CP I can easily understand exactly why James Jones did what he did. If someone threw a condom on and smacked my daughter in the back of the head it would take everything I had not smack the kid silly and then go after his parents and the bus driver that let it happen on .
In my experience based on the way I was raised I would think it’s probably best to go do exactly what James did, but based on my personal experience and observing others I think perhaps a different approach would be better. In the end the approach the man took was no better than what the children themselves were doing regardless if he was acting that way for the right reasons. His actions made it so his daughter will not be able to return to the school they had her in. It was his actions that took a bad situation and made it worse.
The children whom he yelled at are no more educated and do not better understand his daughter’s CP, they have experienced the same behavior that they are portraying and they will likely miss the point that got the father so fired up in the first place. Plus the dad is really just spewing vitriol into the air as he was not going to act on anything he said anyway. At lease I hope he wasn’t planning on killing anyone and there is no evidence that he was.
So what would have been the correct response. I can’t speak for James but I can project myself into his exact situation as it’s only 5-6 years away and we’ve already experienced some issues.
As any reader of this blog knows Haley was called weird at the begining of first grade by another girl in her class. Haley didn’t know how to respond initially and felt very dis-empowered. With the help of my mother-in-law, she and Haley wrote a book which they read to the class. We decided it was so good that we needed to publish the book and it is available for sale here.
I’ve heard some people respond to the story of the girl calling Haley weird as if it were bullying but in my opinion it is not. This girl simply did not understand what and why Haley walked differently from everyone else she observed. There was no intent to harm or hurt feelings and the book helped her understand Haley better.
But what if we project into the future. In Middle school the kids who don’t already know Haley will either avoid her or in the worse case bully her. Truthfully while it won’t be too late to educated the kids it is likely that they will have already stopped listening to adults and the best we can do is educate via example.
As I sit here I am hopeful that any warning signs about bullying behavior would be picked up on and communicated by my daughter way before the type of situation James Jones had to deal with. If that is the case I expect I’d have conversations with the school first and if that were not successful. I discus the situation with the kids and their parents. Once this line has been crossed the only path left is to discuss with the police.
Finally if that did not take care of the problem I would then take matters into my own hands and do something similar to James, although it would be useless at that point because it would contradict everything I had already tied to accomplish.
