I’m way, way behind in telling this one, but here’s a story about bullying that I’m smiling as I’m writing.
Being the victim of bullying brings with it all kinds of trouble–depression, isolation, loneliness, self-blame. But there are some very cool findings in the bullying literature on the one friend phenomenon. What the research shows is that kids who are bullied, even those who are victimized day after day, tend to fare relatively well in terms of psychological outcomes like depression and loneliness if they have just one good friend that they can rely on for support and companionship. One supportive friend can act as a buffer against those terrible feelings. You can imagine that–how much of a difference it is to go from zero friends to one. It can mean the world.
So imagine going from zero friends, from being bullied every day for years, from seeing your peers wear bracelets that say they hate you and seeing the “I hate you” pages on the internet–to having literally thousands of supporters, with letters to prove it. It happened to a girl named Olivia, and it happened because two sisters who heard her story decided to remind her that not every teenager is petty and cruel.
Emily and Sarah Buder read a newspaper story describing Olivia Gardner’s school life. Horrified, they organized a letter-writing campaign and began with the modest goal of collecting 50 encouraging letters to send to Olivia, who lived in a nearby town. Within weeks, they had 500 letters–and then more and more. The letters were from fellow victims, former victims, even former bullies who regretted their terrible behavior. The letters underscored how long-lasting the effects of bullying can be–both for victims, who never forget what it felt like, and for bullies themselves, who spend remorseful years trying to undertstand why they acted so cruelly.
The Buder sisters and other teens like them are my superheroes. And I don’t mean because they did Something Big to help Olivia–because they did something. It just takes one friend, one connection, to help a child who feels like nobody cares. This is where my scientist self and my mom self get to high-five: I read the research about having just one friend, and then I see a story like this, and I’m reminded of the kinds of things I want to teach my daughter.
Many of Olivia’s letters have been published together in a book called Letters to a Bullied Girl. You can browse through some of the letters on the publisher’s website–definitely worth a few minutes of your time.
My thirteen-year-old niece Taylor is spending part of the summer with us. I had no idea how much time teens spend text messaging, IM’ing, and MySpace-ing their friends until she showed up at our house, cell phone in hand and asking to borrow the laptop.
It’s kind of astonishing, actually. On the rare days that we have no need or desire to get out of the house, Taylor can kill twelve straight hours using some kind of technology for social purposes. At first I was appalled— She’s not even talking to us! That phone vibrates every 30 seconds! She’s been staring at the computer screen for three hours! Does she even go to the bathroom anymore? Oh, yes—she just takes the phone with her. I have uttered more “old fogey” comments in the last two weeks than my mother did my entire adolescence.
But over these weeks, I have come to appreciate the constant beeping and buzzing of the cell phone, even the brief snippets of rock music I hear when Taylor loads another friend’s MySpace page. Why? Because, despite hanging out with just her uncool aunt and uncle, her infant cousin, and some pets, she’s not lonely. She hasn’t seen a friend in almost three weeks, yet I haven’t seen a twinge of homesickness. I hear details about her friends’ vacations and about movies they saw and about the boy her cousin recently went out on a date with (“Really cute, but way too old for her!”), as though they’ve all paraded through my living room to share their stories. Taylor is several hundred miles away from her nearest BFF, but she’s connected to them in a way that I’m not connected to even my own friends right next door.
I know, I know, there’s more to all of this technology than facilitating social relationships. My husband forwarded me this article describing a recent study of the presumed side-effects of all this connecting, and it’s sobering. “I don’t care if it is normal for a 13-year-old to spend 12 hours on mindless chatting,” he wrote me. “It’s just not physically or mentally healthy.” I agree with the “physically” part. But Taylor’s mental health seems, well, pretty healthy.
Most days, Taylor and I get out of the house together, even if it’s just to run an errand. We’ve even gone to the gym to run laps together and taken a few yoga classes. And our little family has dinner together every evening. The rest of the time, she’s texting or IM’ing or MySpacing—sometimes, it seems, all three at once. It’s not how I like to spend my free time, but I’m not her and I’m not 13. And I’ve actually been inspired to update my MySpace page for the first time in three years. Maybe I’ll make some connections of my own.