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.