should parents of bullies be held liable?

[SheilaT]

93. My son was no longer bullied in the private school.

There, being smart and good at school was valued and admired. Sports were downplayed compared to at the public school. The vastly higher ratio of teachers to students meant that the teachers could pay a lot more attention to student behavior and nip a lot of bullying behavior in the bud.

From my friend's son's experience in the public middle school, I am pretty sure my son would have been suicidal by the end of 7th grade. It would have destroyed him.

Because we did not know at the time that he was autistic, he has Asperger's Syndrome, we did not fully understand what was going on. The change was incredibly important to him.

The younger son, who is very socially adept said to me around the time he was in 7th grade, "I'd be in trouble all the time if I was still in the public school." That was amazingly insightful of him. He'd begun to hang out with the "wrong" kids and was willing to do a lot of relatively risky behavior. As it was, he was no paragon of virtue in high school. He got suspended once for showing up at a school event drunk. He got picked up on possession of marijuana the summer before his senior year, cheated his way through the drug tests, I'm fairly certain. Things at home got so bad that in the spring of that senior year he moved out and stayed for about six weeks with a friend. A couple of times a week I'd drive over to the school to make sure I saw his car in the parking lot. I was genuinely afraid he'd flunk out of high school right before graduation. Even though his grades did drop, he graduated, went off to college, graduated from college in four years cum laude.

We had a conversation about that whole thing a few years ago, and he told be that he basically wasn't the kind of kid to get totally lost. He also said that he was very glad he did what he did in high school because at college he saw too many classmates finally breaking free and screwing up with drink, drugs, not going to class. So he had the closer monitoring of the private school, and the greater support that a situation like that can provide. I hope our parenting also was good.

All this is why I so strongly support vastly better funding for the public schools. It is crucial that they also have the smaller class sizes and all the support that's needed for all the special needs students that they must take in.

Private schools are not exempt from bullying. Part of the whole bullying thing is that it should never be tolerated at any point. Most of the time the kind of bullying that is seen as perfectly okay in schools is not permitted in the adult world. But not always. There are too many situations in which bosses bully or co-workers bully. One of the nice things about getting older is that there's a lot of crap I just won't put up with.