Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can kill me

I remember singing that little song as a child wishing it was true.  The fact of the matter is, words do hurt and leave scars sometimes far deeper than any physical scars we may have.  In my many, many years of working in Children’s ministry I have learned that children can so sweet and so cruel, especially to one another.  That cruelty can often manifest itself in the form of bullying…something we all will need to deal with at one point or another.   Bullying has made national headlines recently so I thought the topic deserves some attention.

I remember singing that little song as a child wishing it was true.  The fact of the matter is, words do hurt and leave scars sometimes far deeper than any physical scars we may have.  In my many, many years of working in Children’s ministry I have learned that children can so sweet and so cruel, especially to one another.  That cruelty can often manifest itself in the form of bullying…something we all will need to deal with at one point or another.   Bullying has made national headlines recently so I thought the topic deserves some attention.

One Time magazine cover this month pictured three teen boys who committed suicide this past month as a result of internet bullying.  Instructor magazine’s cover story (Fall 2010) was also about bullying and offered the following statistics:

The recent media coverage caused me to ask two questions: Why are these children and teens not reporting the bullying?  Why do some feel that death is the only alternative?

Perhaps we should look at the emotional development of adolescents to find some answers.  Erik Erickson’s research suggests all people go through a series of crisis’ they must resolve as they grow and mature.  As infants, Erickson wrote, the crisis we must settle is that of trust vs. mistrust.  The most significant relationship we have is the one we have with our mother.  As we learn we can trust her, we learn we can trust others and we are able to move on to the next stages in our development (there are several more before we hit our elementary years).  During our elementary school years, achievement and accomplishment is what we seek and the significant relationships in our lives are those with school teachers and friends.  As we move into our adolescent and teen years, we enter the stage where we work to resolve our identity and the most significant relationships in our lives are those we have with our peers.  What are peers think is what matters most.  Stay with me now…

If, during our teen years, we are told over and over again how much of a failure we are by our peers whose opinion we value most, we will begin to believe it.  Little if anything said to us by an adult will make us feel better because what our peers think is far more important to us.  I’m certain it is far more complicated than this, but perhaps this is but one part of the reason why some teens feel it would be better to be dead than ridiculed.

What does this mean for us, the Children’s Ministry team?  It means we need to know when bullying is occurring among the children in our ministry.  We need to take it seriously and we need to do what we can to put a stop to it.  We need to create a safe environment in our churches for our children and youth.  We need to take every opportunity we have to tell and show these children that Jesus loves them and that we love them too.  Our children and teens need to know there is hope and that hope is found in Jesus Christ.  They need to know they were created for a reason and they need to stick around long enough to find out what that reason is.

Hug a child today and tell her Jesus loves her and you love her as well.