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Written by Rabbi Irwin Katsoff
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Realize that negative speech, whether by children in fifth grade or adults around the water cooler, can have serious harmful ramifications that can affect people for years.
Develop techniques to eliminate verbal violence in families. Stop and think before you lash out, because family members know where relatives are vulnerable, and a cutting remark or derogatory name stays with a person even after they've made peace.
Give your children tools for dealing with sticky situations. When kids are dumping on another child, such as calling him "ugly" or calling her "fat," it may be too much to expect your child to stick up for the victim. You can, however, teach your child to say, "I'm not comfortable with this," and distance him/herself from the scene. Afterwards your child will feel better about him/herself, and the abusive kids may get the message.
Recognize how much damage verbal violence does. According to polls, 90% of Americans consider peer teasing and shunning during adolescence to be a problem. Star Jones quoted a Words Can Heal poll that found that 63 million Americans admitted that people say something untrue about them at least once a week. Eliminating harmful speech is a cause worth working for.
What Else Are We Supposed to Talk About?
During the TV broadcast, Ms. Sarandon mentioned a personal anecdote. She arranged a sleepover party for her daughter's 11th birthday. When the girls were all assembled, she said, "Can we just try to not talk about somebody who's not here?" (See rewritten paragraph below during the segment, Susan made reference to the girls "really flexing their muscles" in gossiping. I have rewritten this paragraph to be truer to the context.
Ms. Sarandon made reference to a personal anecdote during the TV broadcast. At a sleepover party she gave for her 11-year-old daughter, the girls were gossiping about others "really flexing their muscles". Ms. Sarandon finally said, "Can we just try to not talk about somebody who's not here?"
The response: One little girl looked up and asked, "Then what are we supposed to talk about?"
Amusingly or pathetically enough, the stars on "The View" flung the same challenge at Ms. Sarandon: If we don't talk about the latest romantic and legal woes of celebrities, what can we talk about?
Here are some suggestions from Words Can Heal for alternatives to gossip at every age:
- For Adolescents: Personal problems they're grappling with, such as too much homework, a room that's too small, their desire for a pet vs. their parent's allergy to dog hair, ways to earn money for guitar lessons.
- For Teenagers: Conflicts about their future, such as the desire to be an actor/actress vs. the reluctance to move so far away from home, or the aspiration to be a doctor vs. the aversion to spending eight years plus in higher ed.
- For Adults: World events and issues, such as the proper response to Afghanistan's call for an American peace-keeping force to prevent rape and other civilian atrocities, or the ongoing practice of slavery in the Sudan, or the financial plight of Argentina, or how, post-9/11, we can create "a better normal."
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