Teasing

[Guest guest]

I'm sending this to the group as well, as I feel that it concerns us all.

 

Dear Clark,

I am a mother too, my son is 7 and my daughter 3, vegetarians since birth.

Although my son hasn't reported much teasing, as they don't eat at school

(they only have a snack, sandwich or apple or something like that at 11,

then come back home for lunch), the problem is very much there whenever he

goes to classmates' houses or birthday parties or school outings. In parties

I'm also there, so I do control and prepare a plate for him, but I'm aware

that this won't be the case for much longer as he grows older. In a class

outing, where they stayed for two nights at camp, he did ask to try meat,

and he did: his teacher told me afterwards, because I had explained to her

that we are vegetarians etc... But my policy with him is that whenever he is

out of the house he is free to eat all the crap he likes, although I made it

perfectly clear I don't like it, and explained many times the why. He wanted

to see how it's like, fine. After all, I've eaten meat until I was 25 or so,

when I decided, all by myself and on my own, that I didn't want to do so any

more (now I'm 42). I am aware that he HAS to try it a few times, and trust

that, although at adolescence we'll have a crisis of rejecting everything I

say for the benefit of what the friends say, given the home environment, his

parents' example, our talks, his good heart, he will finally make the good

decision.

 

But the issue in your boy's case -and in mine too, in part- is not, in my

opinion, of meat or not meat. It is entirely focused on the right to be

different from everybody else. It could be about his name, his eyeglasses,

some specific trendy sports shoes that he doesn't have (we had that thing

with my son: he told me " Why cannot you just buy me those shoes so we are

finished with that thing? " and I replied " I would have bought you those

shoes if you had asked me before, if I knew you really wanted them, if it

weren't just to please others: as it is I won't " ), or how he likes his hair

cut, or his family's religious or ethnic background, anything. I mean, if

the teasing was about his parents being, say, Moslems, and his observing the

Ramadan fast (not eating from dawn to sunset) and stopping activities five

times a day to get down on the floor and pray, what would his family do

(supposing they didn't have a Muslim school nearby)? Tell him " go ahead,

don't observe our religion's tenets? " Unlikely! They would try to instil in

him a proudness in being what he is, and the courage to be different and to

stick to his beliefs (which, of course, if we really analyze it, are not

really exactly HIS beliefs but his family's, but then a child up to a

certain age to come up with his own, so we do have to make some choices for

them to give him/her a ground to start with).

 

What I mean is, and you can tell your son that, if he gives in and starts

eating meat just to be like the bullies, they will soon find something else

with which to torment him and to test how chicken he is, and how far he will

go to please them. Test his limits, as it were, and assert their " dominant "

position. And I'm not sure whether it is wise to make them see he's afraid

of them. Next thing they will want him to pull down his pants (symbolically

speaking -I hope)...

 

Does this make sense to you?

 

Irene