The utter and profound sadness that the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in the USA has created for all of us leaves me with wondering exactly how we begin the conversation with each other and with our students at St. Mary's International Middle School about what it all means for us as families, as a school, and as a school community.. The article I have linked to the title of this entry above points to the reality that this adolescent boy and, usually it is adolescent boys involved with these horrific tragedies, not only had access to an obscene number of guns but also that there is no doubt that he was not getting the kind of treatment for his mental illness that would prevent a young mind to do such an awful thing.
It seems as if our society and ours schools just cannot figure out how to create a system of prevention as opposed to a system of reaction and then it is only a reactive system when a disaster occurs. When is it that we will collective ask
"Have We Had Enough?" and begin to realize that these are average children who are doing these things, children who attend average schools, children who are part of everyday families but also children who suffer from mental illness. Is there anything that we can collectively do to be sure that our students are as mentally healthy as they can possibly be? I offer a few suggestions.
- Know your child well and tend to both their physical and mental well-being. Primarily this means to spend lots of time with them doing all kinds of healthy physical and mentally healthy activities with them.
- Do not turn the transmission of values over to media and to the internet. Be sure that your child knows what you value and help them to acquire values by modeling the values you hope to transmit to your child.
- Monitor the kinds of video games that children play and videos they watch and don't believe that constant violence does not desensitize your child to violence.
- Know your child's friends and try to get to know the parents of these friends.
- Do not ignore signs that your son is struggling with some level of mental health issues. Do not be shy or afraid about checking out these signs out with a professional health professional. Do not believe that your child will "grow out" of these unhealthy behaviors.
- Take notice if there is a sudden change of performance, a change of friends, a change of attitude toward you, or a change of sleeping or eating habits. Do not chalk it up to adolescent behaviors alone.
- Do not be afraid of talking with teachers and counselors about issues related to your son. Know that you are not the first one and won't be the last one who have dealt with difficult issues.
- Treat any violent behavior whether it is violence toward animals, violence toward siblings, violence toward you or violence toward peers seriously. Bullying behaviors clearly fall into violent behaviors and should not be taken lightly or as a matter of "Boys will be boys."
- Acknowledge that issues need to be dealt with as a family systems matter. Changing the behavior of your child will mean a change of behavior in family systems.
- Know where your child is, what they are doing, who they are doing things with and hold them accountable for their behavior 24 hrs. a day, 7 days a week. Adolescence is a particularly important time in the development of a boy's brain and helping them through this critical stage requires that parents and other adults are actively monitoring their behavior and assuring that they are safe both physically and psychologically.
At the end of the day, we need to keep the conversation going. We need to sit up and pay close attention to the physical and psychologically needs of our boys and realize that that this takes hard work on the part of parents and on the part of the school. We need to take control of what our boys are exposed to and to provide the kind of guidance and support that will result in healthy development for them in a very complicated and fast changing world.
