Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. You did it again, made a few minutes to check in with this little podcast. This week I've been thinking, amongst other things, about dark humour.
I was overhearing some kids this week at a school, some of you know I visit with schools a lot and I work with something called social inclusion and integrative student support. And so I'm working with children and tweens and teens in schools a lot, you know, week by week. I see kids a lot and I've become, over the years, more and more concerned about how ubiquitous and normalised, really cutting, dark humour has become.
It's almost become a kind of normalised micro-aggression these days. There is so much on screens, on TV and so on, that is quippy, that is dark, and kids with this kind of put-down way and this comeback way of speaking are held up as being really smart and held up as being kind of impervious. And I wonder more and more if this way of speaking has got to do, underneath it all, with anxiety, with a need to kind of protect oneself.
And what I've also noticed, it's not only increasing in terms of frequency, but younger and younger kids are doing it. It used to be teenagers who did it a lot, then it moved into tweenages, sort of 9, 10, 11, 12-year-olds, but I'm hearing really little kids now speak in these quippy, put-down ways that it really catches your ear because they're so little. So regardless of the age, I wanted to just talk a little bit about what we can do to help kids who have fallen into that kind of dark humor.
The first two little stories to share with you today, one story goes way back to when I was a much younger guy and I was working at a group home for, they were then called violent and re-offending youth, anyway. It was a lot of kids who were struggling, teenagers, and it was run by the church, by a church organization. And so my second weekend was my turn to get in the van and take these kids to church because it was a part of the rhythm of what these teenagers did.
And they were treating each other so badly in the van, they were swearing and cussing and cursing and just cutting each other down. And I'm driving the van, this is a young guy, I guess he was about 22 years old, thereabouts, 21, and thinking, oh, poor kids, you know, they've come from really hard backgrounds and I normalized it, you know, I just accepted it. Anyway, I got to the church and they're walking up the garden path, up the path through the garden and through the lawn, and they're meeting with the priest and the brothers and the sisters there at the church, and they're shaking their hands, they're saying, good morning, brother, good morning, sister, they're not going, yo, yo, and they're not saying horrible things, they're really doing well, and I was kind of proud of them, they were doing well, and then we went inside and they joined in and they sung, and they actually, their singing was beautiful, and it wasn't fake, they were really, and they were greeted by many of the congregation who called them by their real names, I never knew Mitch was called anything but dog, you know, he had a name, Mitchell, and they called him Mitch or Mitchell, and so, you shouldn't do this in church, right, but I remember looking across at these kids just behaving really well, thinking, you little buggers, you can do that? Hang on a minute, why have I been putting up with all this other just horrible stuff? So the, I don't know, you shouldn't think that in church, right, but anyway, the thing ended and off we went, we got back in the van, the service was over, and I kind of drove around the parking lot a little bit because I didn't want to embarrass them, but I stopped the van and just said, you guys are beautiful, you know what, you sang beautifully, Lizzie, you've got a gorgeous voice, and Darren, come on, man, you were so, so polite and respectful with the people in the congregation, well done, everyone, but I tell you what, no more of this horrible stuff, and they went, yo, dude, and I said, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not dude anymore, my name is Kim, and that's what you'll call me, and I'll call you Mitchell, and I'll call you, and I said, I'm not doing that stuff anymore, and you know, over the long months and years that I worked in this place, I think right there, I came to establish a little bit of a different relationship, because when I asked them, why did you behave differently like this, their answer was, well, you don't do that in church, right, and I said, well, why not, and they said, well, everyone sort of expects you to be respectful, it's just the way, it's the way they expect it, right, and I thought, well, I can expect it too, and I did, and myself and my co-worker who worked the night shift, the two of us, we came to expect it, and these kids' behavior did somewhat noticeably improve, and when new kids would come to the group home, they were given the quiet word that these two people, you know, are different, and you can't do this kind of stuff.
The message here is that kids can change their behavior according to the strongly inhabited value that the adults around them consistently bring, and they can do it. We do not need to accept this whole put-down thing. We don't need to accept it.
It's not okay, and it, you know, if kids want to speak that way playing out on the basketball court, you know, or with their friends on a play date, whatever, okay, I'm not around, I can't stop them doing that, but the moment a young person walks through my door, through my classroom, through my home, then that is not the way we speak. It's just not, and I'll reframe it for them. I won't, you know, make them feel bad, but I'll say, hey, hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, is what you're trying to say, and then I'll reframe it in a normal but respectful way, and the message gets around.
Kids can change it, and they will. If they speak that way at school, or their friends are speaking that way, we do not need to tolerate it at home. We really, I feel, mustn't normalize that way of speaking at home.
It's like, it's like dark humor is heavy, and it's, and it pulls people down, as opposed to levity, right, which lifts up the kind of light humor, the lifting up humor is really different to that dark humor. Now, I want to tell you one more story about how we can practically help kids with this. I was in New York one day, and I was taking a group of high schoolers and eighth graders into a group of fifth grade students to talk about exclusion and marginalization.
Those of you, you know, might know that's part of my work in a book I co-authored with Luis Fernando Llosa called Emotionally Resilient Twins and Teens. We touch on that issue very, well, it's a core issue, actually. It's more than a touch.
It's a core issue of that book, and there is a story in that book, because it's a book with real stories, not made up, written as read aloud, so you can read a story aloud to your child, if they're feeling isolated or not fitting in or not having friends or being teased or excluded in some way. Anyway, the last story in that book, actually called Darpan's story, does deal with this. Darpan and what it was in New York on this day is that these kids taught me something.
We went into a classroom to talk about bullying and teasing, and I don't often use the term bullying, or at least I use it interchangeably with hyper-controlling behavior, because that's what I think it is, hyper-controlling, not necessarily that emotive bullying term. I like to call it what it is, and so the older kids were trained to talk to the younger ones about it, and they were getting really bothered, and there was one group where voices were being raised, and the high school kids were saying, that is just totally mean. That is not joking around.
It's mean, and they were pretty intense about it, so I, of course, went over to the kids and said, hey, what's happening, and they said, these kids, tell them, and they said, well, look, we're just joking around, right? We don't, it's not, it's just joking around, like when we, and they listed a bunch of things they were doing to this one girl that they felt were joking around. The thing was, the girl was sitting right there, and they were really picking on her, but they thought it was just joking around. Anyway, we finished the session, and off we went, and I was talking to these older kids, these teenagers, and they said, it totally crosses the line, dude.
That is just crossing the line. That is not okay. They think it's okay.
Now, they knew some of the kids in this class because of siblings, and they said, they're not bad kids. It's just that they're crossing the line, and I, you know, we collectively came to a whole kind of like understanding of they need to be helped to know when they cross the line, so the teacher kindly gave us some time the next week, and we went back in, and we talked to them about when does joking around cross the line, and we actually framed it like this. We said, joking around crosses the line and becomes hurtful when dot, dot, question mark, right, like finish the sentence, and the kids, the very same kids gave a bunch of ideas about how when joking how joking can cross the line, and they were great.
They were really good, and the teacher took note of this, wrote it, the kids wrote it down. They put it up on the wall. It basically saved a lot of psychodrama when things were going wrong, and some kids thought it was just joking around, and other kids thought it wasn't, and big conversations.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no. We did that proactively, joking around, and you just look at the list. Now, if you've got kids, and you've got siblings, or you've got kids at school who are talking about this in their school life, you can do this exercise at home, and countless numbers of parents have, and it's as simple as choosing the right moment, right? A lot of parenting is just laying in wait for the right moment, choosing the right moment, and then asking them, hey, when does joking around cross the line? And getting their feedback, and they might say things like, well, joking around crosses the line, I guess, when everyone doesn't think it's funny, like everyone does it.
You say, okay, and you might even write this down. Okay, what else? Well, I don't know, it kind of crosses the line if you're doing it to like put someone down. Okay, so joking around crosses the line when you put someone down.
Yeah, but you don't mean to, but you do. Okay, what else? And you can get four or five really key points in your family about when joking around crosses the line, so that when it does cross the line, you don't have to get all blamey and shamey and have big conversations. You can just say to a child, hey, hey, you know, no, no, Jacob, Jacob, or Janice, you know, did that cross the line then? I think it might have.
Yeah, look, yeah, it did. Okay, all right. And the little one might say, yeah, because I didn't think it was funny.
Okay, so Jacob, you didn't mean it. But it went a bit too far, right? Which is another way of putting it, it went too far. And it crossed the line.
It did. Okay. I think you need to know that.
And we need to put that right now. Because yeah, that crossed the line, didn't it? We need to put that right. It takes the shaming and the blaming out of the situation, but it doesn't let a kid off the hook.
It's a basic tenet of accountability without blame. Kids can be held accountable, but it doesn't need to involve blaming and shaming and putting them down for putting someone else down. I mean, bullying a child who's bullying into stopping bullying is a really weird role model.
So this is the crossing the line exercise. So two points. One is that we do not have to normalize put-downs, dark humor.
It's just, I think it has no place in any family's home. None. And we can help it by bringing that by actually bringing kids to the understanding that when something was funny, that's good.
But then it crossed the line. It went too far. And helping them know that.
And over and over and over teaching them that. Okay. I sure hope that was helpful.
It has been to so many parents over the years. And very, very best wishes with it. Bye bye for now.
