Playground
Growing Up Is Hard & Bullies Just Stink
For kids, I imagine sometimes life must seem more like the reality-show Survivor where there are alliances that change daily. There are secret merges. One day you are in, and the next you are on exile island, alone. Or just voted out – excommunicated, without explanation. Blindsided. My son has been negotiating these waters for a few years now. He knows he has friends; it’s just that most of them don’t currently attend his school.
Last year, when he found himself on the ground at recess, getting kicked in the nuts, he noted later, it wasn’t the being kicked hurt so much (although it did hurt) but that a person he’d thought was his friend for many years stood by and watched it happen. That betrayal hurt him much more. He felt – and still feels – that if that friend had intervened with a “Quit it,” or a “Leave him alone,” that somehow it wouldn’t have been so bad because he would have known he had that one person. That one friend….