The new school year is just getting started, and students are finally back in the building. Unfortunately, many school districts are sending home emails about yet another dangerous new social media challenge on TikTok, the “Devious Lick” Bathroom Vandalism Challenge.
On TikTok, students record themselves vandalizing school bathrooms and then encourage classmates to do the same and share their destruction videos. Schools are finding missing or broken soap dispensers, damaged plumbing and fixtures, and extensive paint and toilet paper messes. This is an especially hard time given the importance of handwashing and keeping bathrooms clean to limit the spread of Covid. It is also providing ample opportunity for students to visit the restroom more often. This “challenge” seems to play out in middle and high schools, but that doesn’t mean your younger child, who doesn’t have unsupervised access to the Internet, won’t learn about dangerous social media challenges at school through peers with older siblings.
The most important advice to give people when talking to our kids about difficult things is to talk less and listen more. While it can be comforting to us to prepare some sage words to pass onto our kids, the best thing we can do when we are concerned about something they are seeing, reading, or hearing about is to listen to them. We really can’t know what to say until we understand more about their understanding of and reaction to something in the first place.
We, adults, tend to be wordy. So if you need to start a conversation like this, bring the topic up neutrally and succinctly. Perhaps something like: “Have you heard of this thing called “Devious Licks” on TikTok or the Bathroom Vandalism Challenge?” Then ask for information: “What do you think of it?” And bite your tongue. You may well be rewarded by having a chance to hear their perspective, their point of view, or perhaps even what worries or concerns them about something like the Vandalism Challenge. You can ask plenty of clarifying questions like, “Why do they think kids are participating when they clearly know it’s wrong to do so?” If they simply shrug their shoulders or offer the all too common, “I don’t know,” you can make some educated guesses. Is it peer pressure, to garner attention and be “cool,” or are they hoping to gain followers and clout on social media?
Once we hear them out, we will be in a better position to try to answer any questions our kids may have to the best of our ability. And yes, then (after listening to them first) we can provide critical adult perspective and advice while setting the clear expectation that this kind of behavior is not acceptable by explaining our concerns, including that this behavior is illegal and could have serious consequences. But it remains still more important to ask questions, reflect what we hear from them, and show interest in hearing more from them since they probably already know that this kind of behavior is not acceptable. This advice applies to all disturbing or confusing content or undesirable behaviors seen on the Internet or anywhere else, for that matter. Because ultimately, if we want our kids to listen to us, we should start by showing them how we listen to them!
If you are pretty confident this hasn’t happened in your child’s school yet, it can still be important to have this conversation proactively. And if you want to know more about what’s going on in their social media world, make sure to follow them on social! Nothing like seeing things firsthand to put us in a good position to ask questions and learn more from our kids directly. If, however, you already know your child was involved in something like this, your first instinct is probably to take their phone / social media access away or issue other punishments. While understandable, reactions like this rarely address the issues that give rise to challenging behavior. As hard as it can be when furious at or disappointed in our children, try listening first if you want to solve the problem in a durable way.
This article originally appeared on Psychology Today.
You may know that many therapeutic schools and psychiatric settings seclude and/or restrain children for the purposes of de-escalation and regaining behavioral control.
“Seclusion” typically refers to the removal of an individual into a specifically designated space used for de-escalation (e.g., a small bare room with padded walls), while “restraint” encompasses a range of interventions by staff member including holding a child’s arms and legs, or use of special tools such as straps, in order to restrict the movement of the child. According to data released from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, 107,000 kids were subjected to physical restraint or were confined to seclusion rooms in schools during the years 2011 and 2012.
Some purport that these interventions are necessary and humane, however, evidence increasingly suggests that restraint and seclusion can be physically and psychologically dangerous as well as costly to agencies. A thorough investigation by the Government Accountability Commission in 2009 found hundreds of complaints of abuse and death caused by negligent use of restraint procedures in schools and pediatric residential treatment facilities, suggesting that there are small but grave risks when physical restraints are performed irresponsibly. Additionally, even when restrictive interventions are performed consistent with safety protocols, patients often report that they are psychologically harmful and aversive. This is particularly true for children and adolescents who have experienced prior trauma.
For a long time, restraint and seclusion were considered the only option if a child’s behavior was “out of control.” As eloquently said by Connecticut Child Advocate Sarah Egan, J.D. in this interesting New England Psychologist article, “They had the hammer and nail approach, not because they were evil but those were the tools they had and so that’s what they used.”
There is a lot of buzz about restraint and seclusion in schools these days because Sen. Tom Harkin (D – IA) and Rep. George Miller (D – CA) have introduced the federal Keeping All Students Safe Act (S. 2036/H.R. 1893) that would ban the use of restraints and seclusion in schools except in cases of clear physical danger.
The New England Psychologist article does a nice job of describing one reason why this issue is complicated: Current definitions and reporting practices of schools vary widely between states and between schools and agencies. Enacting federal legislation across such a heterogeneous system is bound to be very messy.
Another complication that we have been talking about at Think:Kids is this one: It can be very destabilizing to take away one tool without giving schools and agencies another tool to use in its place. If we ask a school to stop restraining and secluding children without teaching staff what else they can do to achieve their intended goals, we can expect mayhem. That’s why we suggest that schools begin acting NOW to think about other ways to de-escalate children and regain behavioral control (or even better, prevent escalation from occurring in the first place).
In 2011, DeHert and colleagues published a paper reviewing four interventions that successfully reduced rates of restraint and seclusion in youth settings. These interventions included a model of strength-based care, a behavioral therapy oriented management program, introduction of a padded room (in this case, they replaced restraint with seclusion), and adoption of the Collaborative Problem Solving approach. Averaging across these four interventions, occasions of restraint were reduced 93%, and occasions of seclusion were reduced 75%. As you can see, Collaborative Problem Solving is not the only way, but it is one way. Talk to us if you want more information.
A final note about the fate of the Keeping All Students Safe Act
Both sponsors of the bill, Sen. Harkin and Rep. Miller, are retiring from congress in 2014. In their absence, advocates are concerned that it will likely be difficult to get this legislation introduced and passed in future sessions. Staff members of both the Senate and House committees agree that it’s critical that concerned parents, advocates, educators and the public let their congresspeople know how they feel about the use of restraints and seclusion in schools and the importance of the Keeping All Students Safe Act. Without that groundswell of support, they say, the bill is likely to die. You can find the phone numbers for your senators and representative here.
Now that bullying-prevention programs are required in our schools, students who are the victims of bullying are finally getting the empathy and attention they deserve. The work, however, shouldn’t stop there.
Behind most bullying programs is the fundamental assumption that students who bully are choosing to do so in order to get something they want (for example, social status or attention), and that these students could behave more kindly if they wanted to. Because of this assumption, students who bully are frequently punished via exclusionary practices like detention, suspension, or even expulsion. The punishment, the logic goes, should teach bullies that their behavior gets them bad stuff instead of good stuff, and when they realize that, they will stop bullying and be kind instead. But if that logic is correct, why do bullies come out of detention, or return from suspension, and bully again?
Research actually tells us that students who are aggressive, oppositional, or otherwise behave in difficult ways are actually doing the best they can with the skills they have. All of us would like to have social status and attention; students who bully are lacking the skills they would need to attain status and attention in adaptive ways; skills like emotion regulation, self-regulation, communication, and social thinking. As a result, they seek status and attention in ways that prove harmful to others. Yes, bullies would like to avoid detentions and suspensions and they would if they could. But detention and suspension don’t teach skills; the bully returns with no more skills than she had when she left and so cannot behave any differently.
While not a popular view, it is clear that bullies lack the skill, not the will, to behave better. So if we want to effectively address bullying, we need to focus on helping bullies develop the skills they need to not bully. Our underlying assumptions about the cause of the bullying leads us to punish the bullies; ironically, it is only by having compassion and understanding for the bullies that we best help future students avoid being victims.
Now that bullying prevention programs are required in our schools, students who are the victims of bullying are finally getting the empathy and attention they deserve. The work, however, shouldn’t stop there.
Behind most bullying programs is the fundamental assumption that students who bully are choosing to do so in order to get something they want, such as social status or attention, and that these students could behave more kindly if they wanted to. Because of this assumption, students who bully are frequently punished via exclusionary practices like detention, suspension, or even expulsion. The punishment, the logic goes, should teach bullies that their behavior leads to bad outcomes instead of good outcomes, and when they realize that, they will stop bullying and be kind instead. But if that logic is correct, why do bullies so often come out of detention, or return from suspension, only to bully again?
Research actually tells us that students who are aggressive, oppositional, or otherwise behave in difficult ways are actually doing the best they can with the skills they have. All of us would like to have social status and attention; students who bully are lacking the skills they would need to attain status and attention in adaptive ways—skills like emotion regulation, self-regulation, communication skills, and social thinking. As a result, they seek status and attention in ways that prove harmful to others. Yes, bullies would like to avoid detention and suspension, and they would if they could. But detention and suspension don’t teach skills; the bully returns with no more skills than she had when she left and so cannot behave any differently.
Fortunately, there are evidence-based approaches that help kids who exhibit challenging behavior build skills they lack, like self-regulation and social thinking skills that are linked to social aggression. Those approaches include things like Restorative Practices, Social Thinking, and our Collaborative Problem Solving model.
While not a popular view, bullies lack the skill, not the will, to behave better. If we want to effectively address bullying, we need to focus on helping bullies develop the skills they need to not bully. Our underlying assumptions about the cause of the bullying leads us to punish the bullies; ironically, it is only by having compassion and understanding for the bullies that we best help future students avoid being victims.
As originally posted in Psychology Today