[dkarl]

Whoops, I didn't even think about seeing the discussion from that point of view, probably because I'm never in a position of authority over children. It's interesting to note that nobody else here discusses the role of authority figures. It certainly never crossed my mind that parents and teachers were even relevant to the discussion. In my experience, adults were pretty much ignored because they either morally condemned all social jockeying and exclusion (when lecturing the bullies) or dismissed it as meaningless (when comforting the victims.)

My gut reaction to you, as a parent, taking part in this discussion is that people put in a position of authority over children seem to instinctively start denying their own human weaknesses. I'm interested to hear what you would say about that. When it comes to social bullying and exclusion, in my experience, adults never acknowledged that we were going through a difficult process of learning adult behaviors. Implicitly, they pretended that there was no grown-up way to do what we were doing, because social divisions and inequalities did not exist in the adult world.

I think we could have regarded adults as valuable sources of coaching if they had just been honest instead of trying to be perfect, inhumanly pure role models. You know, even socially dominant teenagers are clumsy and self-conscious. They would probably appreciate some tips on how to enforce social boundaries without being jerks about it. That would benefit everyone. As a parent, could you even do such a thing, or would it compromise your authority too much to admit that adults do the same things that teenagers do, only much more subtly and gracefully?

[chairface]

Well, that's a pretty decent analysis for not having thought about it before. I agree that as a child, it seemed that adults had a penchant for denying that they are anything like children, and I think that was a mistake on their part.

Anyway, I'm not too concerned with compromising my authority as a parent. I'm currently more concerned that my kids will be more on the aggressor end of conflicts, and my approach to that has been to tell them parts of my own story, and how I felt when people did mean things to me (they're pretty young, it doesn't get too involved). I suppose they could eventually come to see me as a weakling or something, but I don't really feel that this is a danger right now.

I have a feeling that I might start to feel the need to hide my weaknesses as my kids get closer to their teenage years, but at least for now, I think you and I are pretty much on the same page.