Leading young people from violence to volunteering
Researchers explore kids’ happiness
The school shooting tragedy in Newtown, Conn., has left most people feeling shocked, confused and a bit numb. Copycats have closed schools in Ponoka, Devon, Medicine Hat and other Alberta communities, and police across North America are on high alert for school threats on social media.
The Newtown shooter was a 20-year-old male, and the teens accused in Ponoka and Medicine Hat are 17and 18-year-old guys. While there have been a few documented female school shooters, the overwhelming majority have been young males.
The glib phrase “troubled young man” used by newscasters doesn’t begin to explain what’s going on here. Experts tell us that those who threaten or carry out violent acts don’t fit any neat pattern, such as coming from a troubled home or having a criminal record or history of psychiatric illness. One common thread in many cases does seem to be a history of bullying and a feeling of persecution.
Before commenting on the existential absurdity of combating school violence by arming teachers, I should disclose that I taught in a school where the director kept a loaded gun in his desk. It was an adult computer training vocational school in New York City in the late 1960s, and some of our students were pretty rough cases. As far as I know, the gun never left the locked drawer of his desk, but he showed it to me the first day I taught there, mentioning that he was a Vietnam vet and knew how to use it.
Since it isn’t common practice, we don’t have a lot of data about the risks and benefits of keeping guns in schools, but we do know a lot about guns for home defence. The best research on this comes from the U.S., where an estimated 40 per
Students who performed kind acts experienced ... bigger increases in peer acceptance ...” STUDY
cent of adults report keeping a gun in the home for protection or recreational purposes.
A 2004 study from the U.S. Centres for Disease Control found that “persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home.” In fact, the rate was almost double.
Males with guns in the home stood a 10 times higher risk of dying from suicide in the home than males who did not keep guns at home. So that “defend my property weapon” seems to be used most frequently to inflict harm on its owner or others in the household.
By analogy, expecting a high school physics teacher to play “School Marshal” sounds comical until you consider how little chance he or she would stand against one or more beefy teens bent on using the school weapon for mayhem.
What we really need to do is create a world where young men do not feel a need or desire to shoot up their schools, or make threats on social media, and where those who have problems get the right kind of help. While it may sound Pollyanna-ish to think that we can magically make our kids happier and nicer, there’s new research that suggests just that.
Professors from the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Riverside recently went into 19 Vancouver classrooms with the express goal of finding out how to make nine- to 11-year-old children happier. These “tweens” were divided into two groups. One group was assigned to keep track of places they visited, while the other was asked to perform three acts of kindness per week.
Examples provided by the authors included “gave my mom a hug when she was stressed by her job,” “gave someone some of my lunch” and “vacuumed the floor.”
After four weeks, both groups improved in measures of well-being, but “students who performed kind acts experienced significantly bigger increases in peer acceptance (or sociometric popularity) than students who visited places.” In other words, doing good deeds made them more popular with their schoolmates. The authors note that increased popularity “is related to a variety of important academic and social outcomes, including reduced likelihood of being bullied.”
So, at least for that age group, we now know that the goals of being happy, being kind and being wellliked are reciprocal — they seem to promote each other. Of course, any parent will tell you there is a huge gap between the middle school kids studied here and the surly creature that emerges from the bathroom a few years later after pubertal hormones kick in.
Still, there’s a lot to be said for planting positive seeds in youth of all ages. The charity-oriented We Day movement is aimed at those 12 and older. It attracted 18,000 people to Calgary’s Saddledome and similar crowds in other cities. There is indeed enthusiasm among our youth for helping others instead of threatening them. Now we know that kindness may also bring them closer to the Holy Grail for most teens — popularity with their peers.