Wednesday, February 24, 2010

An Unreliable Source

One of the challenges that we've been grappling with lately —and most definitely one playing some role in the backslide in Blink's behavior — is a major conflict/bullying situation Blink's in the middle of at school. Another child (with special needs of some kind) has been targeting him physically and verbally, to the point that Blink was completely stressed out and started lashing out physically toward the child on a preemptive basis. That, it seems, is what got the school's attention.

I feel like they should have done more, earlier. However, I wasn't much better in recognizing the severity of the situation. Blink could go on for hours about "bullying" that was nothing more than another child tiring of being bossed around.  So it's hard to know when to take him seriously.

I checked in with him today about his encounters with said child. He informed me that the child said something mean to him at lunch.  I asked him what he did and he told me he went up to a teacher, told her, and asked her to go insult him(!).  Ha.  Oh, Blink.  He did laugh about it at dinner. "That was a little bit silly, asking her to insult him," he said.  I was so happy that he got a teacher rather than exploding, but inside I was boiling in that Mama Bear kind of way that this child was calling my son names and thinking I ought to check with the teacher, etc.  And then Blink offers up, "Well, I might have kind of made [other child] call me names."  When asked for clarification he says, "Well, I might have thought that he insulted me when he walked in the room, but maybe I was wrong."  I asked him if he said anything mean to the kid.  He said no but then faltered and admitted he "got mad" and I wasn't able to get to the bottom of the matter.  His daily report has a smiley face for lunch, so....perhaps it was a minor blip.

I swear, it's enough to make a mama want to send her child to school with a hidden camera.  I find it so hard to advocate for him when my only source is so unreliable.

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