Oh great. A school doesn't communicate with a parent body about chaos among the kids.
What's the goss? According to parent complaints reported by The Canberra Times, boys at Radford College were in an online chat group where boys were rating girls' appearances. When I say boys, these ones were in year six. Same thing happened at Canberra Grammar this year too. The kids at Grammar might not have been that young.
In the case of Radford (which says the allegations were investigated but could not be substantiated), fees went up by 20 per cent this year. Those year six parents are paying well over 20 grand a year, for a school which has not communicated all that well about the problem. Parents say only the boys were on the receiving end of a chat from the school.
Apparently the girls being objectified wasn't a matter of concern, or not enough to have a chat with them about it. Geez, I would have got them all in a room learning jiu jitsu because the kind of school culture which allows boys to think girls are objects leads to many other different kinds of behaviour. Good to get girls learning self-defence anyway.
Weird choices by the school so I'm here to help you tell you what you should say to your sons, even if they are not in year six at a private school. What you should always say to your sons. And your daughters. Any kid of any kind.
First thing. No matter what awful thing the kid has done, always take the love route. I mean, this is what all the experts say although I swear, back in the day, I felt like sending my kids to their rooms for a very long time. Or at least long enough for me to calm down.
The love route means telling them that no matter what they've done, you will always love them.
Unconditional. Unending. A lot. I used to say, up to the sky, down to the ground, all around the world sideways. Maggie Dent talks about grains of sand and hairs on bears and it sounds glorious and endless.
Which can be easy to say unless you are in a rage about them rating girls online as hot or not. Mark Zuckerberg, the online originator of this guff, has a lot to answer for.
Matt Tyler, former chief wrangler of the Man Box research where he worked on prevention and early intervention, and now an adjunct associate professor at Monash and at UNSW Sydney, is dead keen on that.
"Tell him you love him - no matter what - but make it clear you want to talk about what he's doing and it's serious."
Any one of you with kids will know that it's at about this point where the need to remain calm remains both essential and nearly impossible. Tyler doesn't mention calm. It's probably ingrained with him. The rest of us? Not so much.
The way we can predict how these conversations when the going gets tough will pan out is how the conversations went before the going got tough.
Have we talked to our kids about how society shapes boys and girls, women and men? Do we talk about what those societal expectations are? Have we talked, yikes, about the patriarchy? (Don't panic. It's a thing. Many of us, including Tyler, are trying to unravel it).
Yet it gets to work the minute some kid looks at your baby and goes: what a huge, boofy boy. What a sweet little angel, addressed to your daughter who has kept you up all night crying.
Patriarchy harms girls and women because it is about girls being the object of power and control. I know that's a lot when you are thinking about your 11-year-old angel child but patriarchy is there from the minute they pop out.
Before the numerous crises of parenting hit, you need to have invested time in what US sociologist Leah Ruppanner calls "relationship hygiene" - the mental work of taking care of relationships for oneself, as well as one's children, partner and extended family. Working on how you all relate to each other will set you up to have useful - if difficult - conversations.
Instead of getting angry or trying to shame your kid for bad behaviour, try to stay curious, says Tyler.
Find out why he's doing it. Is it about belonging? Revenge? Humour? What about his mates? Are they all in on it too?
"Keep him engaged in a discussion while also sharing your concerns about the behaviour rather than him as a person," says Tyler. And then appeal to his better nature, or at least the nature he wants to have.
All of this sounds so reasonable, so considered, so unlike me. I like to have a bit of a shout - not that it has ever ever improved the circumstances of my parenting.
What should the consequences be for this kind of behaviour? Explaining how someone might feel if they knew they were hot (secretly pleased but also frightened) or not. Tyler says to ask your kids how they as individuals might feel if it happened to them.
And ask them to be a better kid. Sounds like aspirational hooha but apparently it works.
What happens next can be hard work. Having open chats about stuff which is about feelings and urges and gender and sexuality is utterly exhausting - and that's not just for the kids. Having discussions about who they hang about with and the way they relate to each other. Talk about what good friends really look like. My experience of trying to ban toxic friendships didn't work out well when my kids were little, which taught me to be a bit more diplomatic as they got older.
Then Tyler delivers the most frightening words in the entire parent universe: Make sure your kid can come to you with anything. Aargh.
Now just because we know about it at Radford and at Grammar doesn't mean it's only private schools. This happens everywhere.
Just assuming that public schools will be better communicators. All they want to protect are the kids - and not the reputations which cost a zillion dollars and don't deliver better outcomes anyway.
