One of the things that delighted me endlessly - one of the things I learned to keep my delight to myself about because no one I was working with could see what I was on about - when I was working with behaviorally disordered kids, especially adolescents, was that ignoring was an important skill which kids seriously discussed with adults about how best to work on.
This was mostly in residential, where kids would be in basically the same social groups for almost everything, morning to evening, for months if not years, so in some ways it was even more of a hothouse than high school usually is. And, of course, they were all there because they for one reason or another couldn't live well with foster parents or their original families, and all their capital-I-Issues definitely upped the temperature.
One of the biggest problem behaviors recognized in that context is instigating or setting ___ up. It's widely and explicitly acknowledged that some kids are likely to spend a lot of their time deliberately trying to provoke other kids. This is partly because they have behavioral disorders, and partly because they are adolescents and partly because they are humans. And generally, the kids I was working with were more thin skinned than average teens, if there are such things, which is to say, very thin skinned indeed.
So one of the goals kids would set for themselves or be encouraged by staff to set for themselves was Work on ignoring.
I loved this. Work on ignoring.
"What are your goals for today, Calluna?" "Not spend more than an hour online, do my job, and work on ignoring."
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Your comments are making me very thinky, but I will wait until I have a better brain and am not in the office to try and articulate the thinkiness, and probably do it in my own journal. Thank you for making me think, though.
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Date: 2008-04-11 11:03 pm (UTC)This was mostly in residential, where kids would be in basically the same social groups for almost everything, morning to evening, for months if not years, so in some ways it was even more of a hothouse than high school usually is. And, of course, they were all there because they for one reason or another couldn't live well with foster parents or their original families, and all their capital-I-Issues definitely upped the temperature.
One of the biggest problem behaviors recognized in that context is instigating or setting ___ up. It's widely and explicitly acknowledged that some kids are likely to spend a lot of their time deliberately trying to provoke other kids. This is partly because they have behavioral disorders, and partly because they are adolescents and partly because they are humans. And generally, the kids I was working with were more thin skinned than average teens, if there are such things, which is to say, very thin skinned indeed.
So one of the goals kids would set for themselves or be encouraged by staff to set for themselves was Work on ignoring.
I loved this. Work on ignoring.
"What are your goals for today, Calluna?" "Not spend more than an hour online, do my job, and work on ignoring."
---
Your comments are making me very thinky, but I will wait until I have a better brain and am not in the office to try and articulate the thinkiness, and probably do it in my own journal. Thank you for making me think, though.