This happened in Texas no? You can shoot unwelcome folks on your door step? Kinda crazy the arrested her. I mean did she tell her child to give it to the bully? or did the bully take it from the child? I guess that’s the key differentiator. If he stole it with out any sort of prompting. Sounds like he needs to learn not to drink liquids of unknown provenance (and stop stealing shit). If it was offered to him? well yeah she should be in trouble.
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… aren’t most bullies like that? “My life sucks, so I’m going to get my kicks giving someone else hell. hur hur hur…”
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Speaking as both a parent and a pediatrician, none of the involved parties are in the right here. What the mom did was no different than past stories of parents putting Ex-Lax into cookies or brownies to “get back” at kids stealing their kid’s food. The ones that are most in the wrong are the adults in positions of responsibilities in the school. It is a very rare thing for bullying lie this to go on and not be known by TPTB. And if this kid’s parent(s) are TPTB, that is even more unlikely. The mom may have lost her job, maybe even her professional licensure, over this. The bully will learn that he can get away with anything and will be defended by TPTB, and the kid being bullied will learn that it’s all hopeless. There are no heroes, no winners, and the whole thing just sucks. The only take-home I can see is that our schools need to do a much better job of enforcing respect and politeness between students, but that is not likely to happen under the current environment, especially in a situation like TX finds itself right now. The whole story sucks, the adults involved should be ashamed of themselves, and I hope (likely in vain) that the school will learn from this.
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Bullshit. It’s less toxic than the Coke they serve in the cafeteria.
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But this is the truth. If you have power you can do anything to anyone with almost no consequences. And if you don’t nothing you do can stop it short of suicide without a massive social campaign that can all be washed away with a few triggering pictures of moody gay boys at any minute.
Is this actually not the way the world works? I mean I like the stories where it doesn’t work like that too but they are the exceptions to the rule I think?
Most people here are concerned with the morality of the mother and not the reality that zero tolerance and bullying epidemics are killing off more and more young people. I expect more headlines like this and more handwaving. But it may help Abbott get his precious vouchers passed so maybe we won’t have to worry about public education in Texas much longer anyway.
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Dr. Seuss nailed it many years ago. And the lesson seems to have been lost. We need to be better, I have no other suggestion.
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It is. I hate it. I see it every day. I don’t know what to do, other than be as supportive as I can be. It’s bigger than you and me, and it will take a massive awakening to fix it. If anyone has a better answer, I am all ears.
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I agree with everything else you wrote, but not this. Putting laxative in food as a trap I would agree causes harm, no matter how transitory. That’s not what happened here. No physical harm was caused. Any psychological harm was self-inflicted by the bully, but I still say it’s 99% likely to be pure bullshit.
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It wasn’t made to give to the bully, it was made so if the bully took it (as he often had before), he would then regret taking it.
He said it made him sick, there’s nothing in there that would cause any harm, unless he had an intolerance or allergy to those ingredients.
It was not poisoning, it was a nasty flavor, if I make you feel nauseous by telling you about the time I got my right ring finger hit by a soccer ball and it dislocated the middle joint and broke the bone closest to my hand, and my finger was 2 inches shorter until the doctor grabbed it and pulled it back into place… is that poisoning (hint, nausea can be 100% psychological)?
It wasn’t poisoning, and you’ve made another strawman, you’re pretty good at that.
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And this is where I (mildly) disagree. The risk of actual harm is minimal, but she could not be certain. There are kids where that could have been problematic. Unlikely? Most certainly. But not OK to chance another person on it. Overall, far more “poorly considered” than evil. I don’t think she was trying to poison the kid, just startle them. But it was not a good choice.
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I’m sure that the hospital visit was suggested by a member of staff, nausea can be 100% psychological, and a visit to the hospital does not mean you were harmed, just that you visited the hospital.
None of this makes what she did right, adults can’t and shouldn’t get away with this kind of thing, but you’re severely diminishing the meaning of the word poisoning when you conflate it with what is at worst a slightly mean prank (if it was between kids), and a dumb move from an adult, but still not poisoning.
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“Poisoning” medically? No, no it was not. “Poisoning” legally? That’s the issue with the charges, and I will defer to @danimagoo on that. Legal definitions are not tied to common, nor medical, definitions at all.
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I don’t disagree that legal definitions are different, but jF is insisting this fits into the definition of poison as given by the Texas Poison Control Center, which would be a medical one though?
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It didn’t. Nothing in the mix was different than what is already in the powdered Gatorade he’d already stolen except for the vinegar and there isn’t such a thing as acetic acid allergy. There can be acetic acid sensitivity, but it coincides with citric acid sensitivity, which is a major ingredient of Gatorade.
She didn’t. If we’re playing hypotheticals, what if the bully had a peanut allergy and stole another kid’s Payday? Should those parents be charged with a crime?
We don’t know that she didn’t try that already. We don’t know if she knew it would fall on deaf ears because the bully’s parents work at the school, or that his family has influence in the town. Because all that has been reported is from the police and the school. I think we all know better than to take that as the truth.
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If a parent slaps another child (or their own), I think we all know it’s a bad parenting choice. They are not, however, generally arrested for assault, or child endangerment unless it happens more than once.
The point is not that we should applaud the mother, or nominate her for mother of the year. The issue is that what she did - make a foul tasting drink from regular cooking ingredients - does not merit an arrest, and charge for what amounts to malicious harm. The fact that you don’t seem grasp the concept of appropriate response and proportionality is genuinely concerning.
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Citation required. Assaulting a child is not generally acceptable, and especially when it is not your child, will result in serious consequences. And, there is no debating that what you have described is assault and battery of a child.
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The police and the hospital said he required medical attention.
The report also says she told the child to give the drink to the bully. Where are you giving your information? I haven’t made any strawman argument. I presented actual evidence that you find inconvenient. It was poisoning and she has been charged for a reason.
You have presented no evidence and nothing but speculation.
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You raise holy hell, first with the school, then with the district and with the media if you have to.
Bullying is a systemic problem, and this hasn’t solved the problem for the child. It’s made shit worse, I’m guessing.
No… we shouldn’t accept it.
It doesn’t have to be and we should not stop working for a world where it’s not the truth.
I don’t think that’s fair, as I’m very concerned with that.
Which NOT all of us are arguing here. It’s one person insisting that.
But she didn’t know if it COULD hurt the kid. As @anon29537550 noted, she didn’t know.
No. They didn’t do it intentionally.
Go above the school. Raise holy hell in the media. There are other options than bully the other kid. fucking SUE the school… Bullying is going to continue and as others have pointed out, it’s probably going to get worse for the kid who was being bullied in the first place.
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In my own experience of being bullied for years it took decisive violence on my part to change my circumstances. With the exception of my mother who gave me the confidence to be violent, the adults in my life were useless and the anti bullying schemes in my school just made me a bigger target. I regret the violence to this day but it worked, no more bullying. As you all expect I was branded the dangerous child.
What I mean to say, is what I did shouldn’t have escalated to that level.
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I will point out that I think that the child having defended himself and his mother doing what she did isn’t the same thing at all…
I’m sadly not surprised at all. I also want to remind people of the backlash to weirdo outsiders after Columbine, when the (false) narrative that was pushed for years after was that the shooters were bullied loaners getting back at their bullies. That was not the case, but goths kids all over the country ended up being bullied by both their peers and the schools they were in because of that narrative.
I think that’s probably how most people would feel about it, at least if they weren’t psychopaths. Violence shouldn’t be something reveled in, no matter who does it and why. Sometimes, yes, it might be necessary, but it’s not something to take lightly or as something particularly noble.
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