ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
If you’ve been paying attention, and I hope you have, there seems to be an endless number of parents willing to publicly shame their children for one wrong or another.
There was the local barber who cut a swath so wide in the top of his son’s head the boy looked like an aging old man when he was done. Then there was the Wyoming mother who shamed her teenage daughter by showing up at her school, filming herself taunting the girl about skipping class, and then posting the footage on Facebook. And there was the Kentucky dad who outed his 10-year-old for lying about her age to date older guys.
And what did we do? We joined the pile-on and in some instances led it. The postings went viral on Facebook with parents lining up for the old man haircuts and more than 200,000 people liking and sharing the Wyoming and Kentucky posts.
It’s an old, old story that keeps repeating. It’s hard not to feel for these kids. It’s hard not to marvel at the disconnect between the mischief and what seems to me to be the uncivilized punishment meted out by these parents, to not feel for the real humans who are targets of such heartless campaigns.
And so when I stumbled upon an effort to counter them, it occurred to me that perhaps more needed to be said, that maybe these things keep happening simply because no one has stopped long enough to ask how would that make me feel.
Lori Petro has because it happened to her. Growing up, she was "constantly called out in front of other people for mistakes she made."
“My parents didn’t have social media, but the humiliation I felt within my family was enough to create shame inside of me,” Petro said. “I wrote my first suicide note when I was in fifth grade. In college, I made the attempt.”
Lucky for us, Petro, a parent educator and child advocate living in Philadelphia, is still with us, and she has made it her life’s work because she was a misunderstood kid who was shamed, blamed, judged and guilted, too.
The more kids she saw being publicly shamed, the more she saw the swell of people willing to like and share it, the more convinced she became that something had to be done to counter the trend.
You figure if people stop talking about a thing, it will simply go away. But public shaming seems to extend to every aspect of our society. It used to be reserved for wayward politicians and other public figures to whom we show no mercy, condemning their character defects and even exaggerating their faults.
That’s bad enough but, my God, our children? This is one of those story lines I just as soon not revisit, but Petro is right. Something needs to be done.
To her credit, she is making the effort.
Just in the past few weeks, Petro and two other mothers, Amy Bryant, of Atlanta, and Robbyn Peters Bennett, of Portland, Ore., launched an online campaign called "Stop Shaming Kids" to put an end to the senseless public displays on social media, to raise awareness about its impact on children and to provide alternatives to shame-based discipline to parents and other adults who work with children.
When we talked recently, they were hoping to get a meeting with Facebook executives. They hope they’re willing to amend the terms of service and user agreement to prohibit online shaming of children.
“We can’t tell people how to parent or control what they do, but we can stand up for kids and say, in our communities, this is not allowed,” Petro said. “Someone has to stand up loudly for our children because hurting them is not OK.”
This isn’t the first time Bryant has worked with Petro on child-related issues.
When she shared her concerns about shaming, Bryant said she got it. She wanted to help.
A therapist by training, she has seen the devastating effects of shaming on children and adults. It gives the message that the child is bad or worthless, and while it may correct behavior for the short term, the long-term effects aren’t worth the risk.
“What we want is to help our children develop an internal locus of control, so that when they leave our homes at 18 or 19 or 20, they can make good decisions from their own internal guidance system, not because they’re afraid of being shamed or punished by their parents,” Bryant said.
Within 72 hours of the online campaign's launch, more than 8,000 people had signed an online petition in support of the amendment. By early this week, it had more than 22,000 signatures.
That’s a good sign.
Petro and Bryant will be the first to tell you that parenting isn’t easy, but they’re tired of seeing children being humiliated.
It’s time we all were.
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