Daily Archives: September 2, 2012

Roughhousing 2 : Bullying

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This article is a followup to yesterday’s thoughts about the role of rough play, and will hopefully clarify and extend the points made there.

I realized I wandered quite far afield in yesterday’s piece, so I figured I ought to do another in an attempt to hit some kind of point.

This must be why real writers do outlines, multiple drafts, and all that beeswax. Well, maybe someday.

First, to clarify a connection I left muddy before by wandering off topic : When I point to rough play and its connection to poor social development in nerds, intellectuals, Asperger’s patients, and so on, I do not mean to imply that lack of understanding or acceptance of the greater social context of rough play is the only or primary form of this lack of social understanding.

I just think that it is a very important one, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, because it is something that is with children from the moment they become ambulatory. The vital personality and/or cognitive pattern will be seen even in two year old children. Some will automatically grasp the difference between being invited to rough play and actually being aggressively attacked, and others will treat them as the same, and thus both fail to grasp a basic element of social interaction and come to some understandably dire conclusions about human nature.

But more important this malfunctioning of a social-play mechanism could well be a vital key to understanding how the phenomenon of bullying comes about, and that is what I wish to explore today.

Let us oversimplify by talking just about two broad categories of children, high physicality children and high abstract reasoning children.

The high physicality children tend to express themselves through energetic physical activity, and are highly in touch with their bodies and their capabilities because they are constantly testing and expanding them. They run, they wrestle, they yell.

The high abstract reasoning children, by contrast, express their emotions with words, thoughts, and emotions, and the same energy that the physical child devotes to learning their physical capacities is used, instead, to explore and expand intellectual capacities. They tend to be quiet, introspective, and thoughtful. They write, they paint, they ask questions, they learn.

What happens when two children from these categories interact?

When two high physicality children meet for the first time, there might be a period of tension as they suss out the dominance hierarchy of their relationship, but before long they will discover areas of mutual interest and soon they will be happily playing rough with one another, and expressing their exuberant physicality through active play.

Likewise, two high abstract reasoning children may be awkward with one another at first, but soon they will be happily playing quietly, perhaps playing a board game, or just talking about books.

But when a high physicality child encounters a high abstract reasoning child, the results can be disastrous, as we all know. But the interaction sours very quickly, and in order to understand just what is going on here, we have to slow things down and see things from both points of view.

The high physicality child is often the one to initiate the interaction, and they do so in a way that works perfectly well with other high physicality children : a play-entreaty, delivered in the form of a mock attack of some sort. It might be physical, or it might be verbal, but it must be stressed : this is not genuine hostile intent. It is, to this child, a relationship-opening gambit that has worked well in the past, and which comes naturally to someone who expresses themselves physically.

The high abstract reasoning child, however, is blind to the difference between a mock attack and a real one, and reacts with shock, pain, anger, and distress. The vital social cues are missed, and the child, understandably, views this as an unprovoked attack and reacts accordingly.

The high physicality child is not ready for this and does not understand it. Perhaps they even lack the mental maneuverability to be able to see it from the other child’s point of view. Certainly, they lack the ability to examine what they have learned only instinctively. They can only reach the conclusion that those same social instincts provides them : they have been socially rejected. And they do not know what to do in this sort of situation. The tools they use in other situations are suddenly inadequate.

Now, what happens next depends on the nature of the high physicality child. Most will not become bullies at this point. They might say an angry word or two (only furthering the other child’s impression of unprovoked and incomprehensible violence) but that will be all.

But there will always be some children who, for whatever reason, be it anger issues, or extreme social sensitivity about their own intelligence, or any number of other reason who will respond to this seeming rejection via the most direct and physical manner available : aggression.

And thus, the cycle of bullying begins. The high physicality child, after a few such encounters, comes to the conclusion that “those kids”, the nerdy kind, think they are better than you, and the school system seems to agree, rewarding them more even when you work just as hard as them. A lifelong bitterness can then settle in, along with its attendant and persistent desire to “even the score”.

The high abstract reasoning child, on the other hand, lacking the vital social information that this was not, in fact, an unprovoked attack, is left with the impression that certain kinds of people are violent, sadistic brutes who hurt people for the sheer joy of oppressing the weak, and that people in general cannot be trusted.

Thus, battle lines are drawn and the struggle continues, not just on the playground but throughout our adult lives. The physical types versus the intellectuals, a silent and secret war that might not cost lives directly, but does untold damage on the psychological level every day.

And all because of a simple social misunderstanding.

Surely, we can do something about this, and stop bullying at the source.

On my mind : Nerds and rough-housing

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There is something deeply illuminating about the relationship between being a nerd, and horseplay.

Or roughhousing, or play-fighting, or rough play, or whatever else you care to call it. We nerdy types do not do it, or rather, we do not do it physically. We take the seemingly sensible position that such rough play has the potential to cause pain, and resembles combat, which frightens and upsets us and seems like a bad thing, so why would we do that if we could avoid it?

And we think we are so smart and so sensible, too smart to do the “dumb” things the normal average kids do. But maybe we are simply too smart for our own good.

Because the thing is, this play-fighting behaviour is clearly instinctual, and lots of people seem driven to do it, both physically and via the verbal version known as “teasing”. And somehow, they do it without killing one another or wrecking their relationships forever. If anything, it seems to strengthen their bonds. not break them apart.

We must then observe that this kind of mock-fighting serves a very important social function, and indeed, we nerdy, intellectual types thing we are being smart and logical when we decline to be involved and completely fail to grasp the social education we are missing, but in reality our decision is very, very short-sighted and filled with the hubris of thinking you always know enough about a situation to make an intelligent decision, when you may in fact be extremely ignorant.

This seemingly logical pose, of “always trying to make the best decision based on what you know of the situation”, is actually extremely limiting and fools you into thinking you are being intelligent when you might instead just making yourself feel better about your own ignorance.

I also think this basic lack of connection to the richer social milieu that others pick up instinctively is the deciding factor in how “weird” or “alien” we seem to others, whether we are severe Asperger’s patients or just mildly nerdy bookish types. By focusing so strongly on the intellect, we also firmly close the door against instinct, preferring to trust our powerful minds over the dark and unverifiable worlds of intuition and instinct.

So we lock away all the rich intelligence and perception that the worlds of intuition and instinct could bring to us. If we do not understand an emotion, if it does not fit with our artificially derived explanations of ourselves or a preconceived idea of how things work, we treat it as noise and filter it out of our conscious perceptions.

Instead, we focus on abstract reasoning, and reap enormous benefits in terms of traditional intelligence, academic potential, and other modern intellectual virtues.

But socially…. we have a problem.

Let us examine what the typical of the species gets from this rough play. Two typical human children, by being able to play-fight and tease one another, create a safe outlet for the tensions and pent-up aggression and emotion that is the natural byproduct of human beings living together. We always get on one another’s nerves, and the urge to compete with one another is always there, lurking behind the relatively recently evolved screen of hunter-gatherer cooperation.

By providing this safe outlet, then, tension and anger are harmlessly dissipated via a stylized and watered down version of the very activities the aggression and anger tell us to do.

And what looks like open naked aggression to a socially ignorant observer is actually a highly refined form of aggression, with its own instinctual rules, the primary of which is “do no real harm”. In this rough play, the participants learn what is “too rough” with one another and over time learn exactly how much they need to restrain themselves with one another in order to stay within “play”.

Once they internalize this limit, they can then play-fight freely, and get the benefits of it.

And this special understanding of how far they can go with one another deepens the bond between them, and makes them feel closer to one another and in a way “safer” with one another because they know they can express their emotions (in whatever form) to one another and the other person will understand the sense in which it is meant.

This lets people let the guard down, and that is basically what social closeness is all about.

But we smarty pants types, we know better, right? We are too smart to engage in all that loud, rough, chaotic kind of play.

And so we absent ourselves from a major form of socialization and social development, and end up socially retarded possibly for our entire lives.

Surely there must be some way to intervene in the lives of young people who might be falling into this trap and gently push them in the right direction. Some way to clue them in that there is far more to this world than their narrow minds and insufficient knowledge can predict. Tell them that sometimes, you can only understand the reason for doing something by doing it.

And that you just might not know everything, and therefore should not be so quick to judge things that others enjoy as “stupid”, “pointless”, or “crazy”.

Those things might not only make a lot of sense, they may make a more profound kind of sense than you with your limited point of view can possibly comprehend unless you have been through it yourself.

We intellectuals tend to downplay experience in favour of knowledge. We pretend that makes us smart, that knowing everything about the road is better than traveling down it, somehow.

But in reality, we are just cowards, afraid of life, afraid of surrendering to the flow and seeing where it takes us.

We don’t want to set one foot on the road without knowing exactly where it will take us.

But life’s not that predictable.

You won’t get anywhere trying to learn everything before you do anything.