Posted on June 8, 2011 by Rusty May

Lyn Mikel Brown offered educators, counselors, and coaches 10 ideas for improving our work with bullies and victims. These ideas are the focus of the blog for the next several weeks.

Point #5 – Adjust expectations. We hold kids to ideals and expectations that we as adults could never meet. We expect girls to ingest a steady diet of media “mean girls” and always be nice and kind, and for boys to engage a culture of violence and never lash out. We expect kids never to express anger to adults, never to act in mean or hurtful ways to one another; even though they may spend much of the day in schools they don’t feel safe in, and with teachers and other students who treat them with disrespect.

I work with a lot of special education teachers and I always tell them that there’s no special ed in the real world. Some teachers take offense and remind me that there are services offered for people with disabilities like Autism and I agree. But what about all the others who end up in alternative classrooms? Many of these classes are populated with students who lack the self control, motivation and problem solving skills needed to succeed in the main stream. Who’s going to hire them? What accommodations are available other than prison or welfare? We aren’t preparing them for the responsibilities of adult life and the current “just be nice” campaign in schools will have a similar effect on an even larger number of children.

Truth is, human relationships are messy, complicated, and often cruel. Athletes are constantly brought to task by local radio shows. Grocery store racks are filled with magazines trashing celebrities. Afternoon TV is littered with programs that take great joy in exposing the hostility that people have for each other.

It’s not just the rich and famous who are scrutinized. Any person in a position of authority or who expresses their ideas in public, opens themselves up to scrutiny, hostility, and cruelty. I’m a public figure of sorts and put myself out there on a daily basis doing the work I love. Most of the feedback is positive but I get some very negative comments about what I do, and some people go out of their way to criticize me. When you’re an adult, it’s called free speech, but in school, it’s called bullying.

I do assemblies in schools across the country and I’ve spent a lot of time in the teacher’s lounge. One of the things I’ve notice is how often these “adult” environments mirror the playground in terms of dysfunctional behavior. Teachers openly complain about principals, and each other, and many of them are not shy about telling me what they think about some of their own students.

We also have brain research which reminds us that the frontal cortex, which is where the capacities for empathy and problem solving reside, doesn’t fully come online until our mid 20’s. But even then, most adults are still engaged in many of the behaviors that we expect to be completely eradicated from schools. How many of us have made disparaging comments about a colleague or some random person we saw at the mall in front of our children? How many of us can honestly say that we don’t openly critique and criticize public figures that we don’t agree with on a regular basis? I blogged weeks ago that the level of vitriol we have in politics makes a mockery of the idea that we should all just play nice and get along.

Negativity is big business, from the opinionated judge on American Idol to the highest levels of government; yet we want to continue to tell the next generation to ‘do as I say but not as I do’. Bullies must be stopped and victims helped, but if we’re not honest about ourselves and don’t have realistic expectations about what we can achieve in the short term, we’ll set the bar too high and completely miss the mark.

As a counselor and coach, I aspire to help my clients reach the highest levels possible, but I have to constantly remind myself to have realistic expectations and take it step by step so we’re both not overwhelmed and ultimately disappointed.