Innocence slipping

My 12-year-old son has always been a lot more insightful about human behavior than he ought to be at his age, so I guess our conversation tonight shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to me. Still, it says a lot about all of us when a seventh-grader picks up on the hypocrisy around him.

Our conversation began with him bemoaning the fact that some of the kids on his basketball team were giving him a hard time, telling him he is no good, etc. That was hard enough to hear, since I remember how damn hard middle school was. The worst thing was hearing him say, “The thing is Mom, is if you tell on them or they get caught, it really doesn’t do any good, because they don’t care about the consequences. They probably do get in-school suspension, but they don’t care. Their parents all just come in and say, ‘it was some other kid’s fault’ and the principal maybe believes them. And even if the principal doesn’t believe them, the kids don’t get into any trouble from their parents because their parents believe that their kid didn’t do it.”

What the heck do you say to that last statement? I make it a practice not to lie to my kids about the way the world works and I have to say that, in a lot of cases, he is spot on. I did mention the whole, “You have to live with yourself and your behavior at the end of the day” thing, which I believe strongly in, being a great avoider of guilt. Still, pretty sad that a 12-year-old observes this phenomenon that so many adults are blind to.

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