As a boy growing up in India, Deebak Doshi remembers seeing children pick on each other. Now that he has children of his own, he has become concerned about it happening to his son.
So he attended a recent parenting seminar to learn more about the Easing the Teasing program being implemented at his son’s school, Aldrin Elementary in Schaumburg.
“Teasing is universal,” Doshi said. “I came, basically, because my kid was complaining about teasing at the school, and I wanted to know more about it.”
The seminar was led by Judy Freedman, a school social worker at Prairie Elementary School in Buffalo Grove. Freedman has turned her experiences and 16 years as a school social worker into the Easing the Teasing program being used in several area elementary schools.
The program comprises 10 strategies that teach children and parents how to cope with teasing and how to tell “good” teasing from bad.
According to Freedman, good teasing is playful and makes everyone laugh, including the person being teased, but bad teasing is hurtful, mean or cruel.
With girls more than boys, teasing also can mean exclusion, she said.
Although Freedman acknowledges that teasing can’t be eliminated, children can be taught skills so they can handle it by themselves.
At Aldrin, the program was added as a way to make schools safer, said Glenda Klein-Mali, the school’s social worker.
“We are working a lot with safe-schools programming, and I thought this was a practical program for teachers to implement,” Klein-Mali said.
During her seminar, Freedman cited national statistics indicating that up to 160,000 children a day miss school because of fear or intimidation.
For most of her tenure as a social worker, Freedman said, she has taught kids how to cope with teasing by feel or intuition.
Freedman said she has found that once armed with the appropriate skills, most children can handle routine teasing with little adult intervention. Then the teasing often disappears or diminishes as the teaser’s tactics become less effective, she said.
“There is a difference between teasing and bullying,” Freedman said. “If the teasing is chronic and severe, a child usually can’t handle it alone. But children can handle most teasing among peers.”
By learning to ignore teasing or by using humor or compliments to offset it, children can show teasers that their words have little or no effect.
“The tease is successful when the teasee is visibly upset,” Freedman said. “Children need to tell themselves, `I am not going to react with anger or tears.'”
Freedman turned her work into a self-published guidebook in 1998 and gave her first Easing the Teasing seminar in 1999. She is working on an expanded version of the guide, which is to be published by Contemporary Books in spring 2002.
For more information on the Easing the Teasing program, call 847-835-0543.SCHAUMBURG
