Reply to Whitman Teacher and Crew Coach Arrested

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Reply to "Whitman Teacher and Crew Coach Arrested"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As for the parents who claim they didn't see it: most parents don't want to believe something like this could happen to their kids.  Many don't have any kind of experience, personally or professionally, with sexual predators.  And plenty are SO horrified by the thought that they bury their heads in the sand rather than learn the signs.  Couple that with the uber-competitive nature of many parents in this area, and, yeah, it's easy to see how it happened. [/quote]

This is an excellent point. We should definitely be educating ourselves and our children better when it comes to social predators (whether sexual or not!)

For example: The emotional "overshare" is a classic grooming tactic, whereby the predator "opens up" -- often in a calculated way. This increases the likelihood that a decent, empathetic young person will open up in return -- which makes them more vulnerable to future manipulation. E.g. The predator could use what is shared against the target. Or -- more often -- the predator uses the emotional vulnerability to ramp up grooming. this can happen very slowly, over a span of years... So you don't even notice.

[quote=Anonymous]
People seem to be making the assumption that parents who push their kids into the "best" academics and the most competitive sports are caring, observant parents, but usually, they're doing so out of their own self-interest.[/quote]

Look, there are lots of people who have drunk the achievement top-25-college Kool Aid. I agree that people make a lot of crap decisions in service of what is in my opinion fool's gold -- and I get frustrated in many contexts by parents whose worldview seems unduly narrow and inflexible. But some of my best friends are caring, observant parents who've drunk the chase-the-college-acceptance Kool aid... More often they are plagued by anxiety -- e.g. what will happen if we don't push? our kid will never stand a chance unless we do xyz -- and this is the part I believe we can address more constructively.

We need to be reassuring our kids and our communities that there are multiple paths to "success," multiple paths to good, to practice being honest with ourselves -- ruthless, even -- about our motivations and our fears. If nothing else, that work provides a relief map of our blind spots and vulnerabilities. [/quote]

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