We’re letting our kids down.
There’s no other way to put it.
Our kids are growing up in a society that has changed
irrevocably since today’s adults were young so that we (the grown ups) simply
cannot recognise the depth of problems that today’s youth face. Two girls' lives have ended as a result of
cyberbullying http://tinyurl.com/8cq9f8v and the advice to parents in response is to talk to your kids
about the on line space. But what are
they meant to say? How can they
formulate words for a world that many parents simply do not understand or visit
themselves?
Parents are at the coalface of the difficulties today’s kids
face but they are often ill equipped to either recognise or deal with said
issues. And this is a societal problem
that needs to be addressed by society and not just parents alone.
Bullying be it on or off line, whilst initiated by 1 or 2
people is facilitated by others.
By-standers don’t just allow bullying to happen but actually expedite
it. Our kids need to grasp this. And parents need to be supported in helping
their children understand this.
I’ve said many times before our kids are (to a degree) digital
literate but not life literate, and we the adults in society need to help them
become life literate. This starts at
home for sure, but given that kids spent so much of their day in school, it
must also continue there.
In the absence of a national media literacy programme,
schools take an ad hoc approach to talking to students about the online and
media environment in which they’re living.
This isn’t enough. The changes
and the importance and immersion of the media world in today’s kids’ lives far
outweighs the attention this part of the education system gets.
A media literacy programme could talk to the students on two
levels: firstly it could talk about how
the media works (which is important given the recent body image research). And secondly, it could explore how students
engage with the plethora of media available to them, what the explicit and also
critically the implicit etiquettes and issues are regarding this usage, and
what the repercussions are.
School-based programmes can be extremely effective in
imparting social messages. But they need
to be properly formulated and executed, to be teacher-friendly but also to
include an element that extends the programme into the home. By involving both influences – the school and
the home – greater impact can be achieved.
There is no silver bullet to stop bullying, but taking collective
responsibility and action is a start.
