How Parents Can Advocate for Their Kids

Hair pulling, name calling, even punches. What do you do when somebody is not being nice to your kid and it's happening at school? Now, this is a complex topic, and it's something we're talking about here today on this podcast. If you've ever had this happen, you know how frustrating, irritating, scary, all those things it can be. And at the same time, you want to teach your kid how to stick up for themselves and those things, while also understanding that something needs to happen on the other end, too, so that child doesn't continue to do those things to your kid. How do you address it? The first thing we typically want to do is address it with the teacher. Susie came home and said, these things are happening. She said she told you, and nothing happened. From my time being a teacher, I know that not everything the child says is always a hundred percent accurate, especially if they're like, oh, the teacher didn't do anything. Sometimes 100% is accurate, but not all the time. So we want to get to the bottom of it without necessarily accusing the teacher. And really, ultimately, what you want is for your kid to be okay and safe and able to learn in a safe environment. And so what we're going to do is obviously go to ChatGPT or Cloud, whichever one you prefer. And we're going to put in a prompt like this. I want you to think like a psychologist, a therapist, and a moderator. I'm going to give you context around what happened. So. So then you're gonna say, tell it what your kid said, and then you're gonna say what you want the outcome to be. So this is what happened. What I want is for my kids to be able to learn in a safe environment where they don't feel bullied, where they don't have X, Y and z happening. So I want to be able to get that to happen as quickly as possible. Then you're gonna tell it what you want it to help with. So in addition to the outcome, we're gonna say, I want you to help me and come up with a plan to be able to talk to the teacher and whoever else I need to talk to in a calm, respectful way. Also makes it clear that this behavior is not acceptable and I want their help coming up with a solution so this doesn't continue to happen. Now, depending on your philosophy of parenting, the next part might be different, but for me, I'm also going to say, and I want your help figuring out how to my kid what to do when this happens or if this happens again. I'm assuming at Some point in their life, this is going to happen or something. Maybe not, you know, puncturing like that, but something similar might happen. And they don't know how, if they don't know how to handle it, to be able to provide them the resources so they can learn how to handle it. So I'm also going to ask it to come up with a plan can help with my kid. Or I can even say, you know, is what they told me so far. Here's what they said they did. They told the teacher, they said, no, don't do that. And I have it what they told me they did and what they said. And I'm going to say, okay, this is, you know, and this is how they felt about it. This is what they did. They weren't satisfied with the outcome. It's still happening. And so what we want from this is for them to be able to have the outcome they want, which is X, Y and Z. They want to be able to feel empowered or whatever the word is that you want to use here. And so I'm not only looking for a plan of how do I talk to another adult about what's happening and make sure that it doesn't continue to happen. And I'm also talking about how do I help provide my kiddo with the resources so they know what to do if and when something like this happens again. As a parent, I remember, as a new parent, I remember more seasoned, more mature parents saying things like stuff, you know, no guidebook. There's gonna be a lot of things that you feel like you don't know how to do it. I heard them. I don't think I actually believe them. Extent that, like, there really is no guidebook chat GPT, you have a way to figure the outcome you want by pulling from its massive amount of data and information that it's pulled in. The outcome I'm looking for in the prompt is for it to give suggestions on how they can defend themselves, give suggestions on how they can delegate, not delegate, handle a situation like this with diplomacy. But ultimately how they can keep themselves safe if somebody else isn't stepping in to help in the situation. Again, your parenting style might be different. So you may want to take a different approach. That is totally fine. Ultimately, you're just going to tell it whatever it is that you want, whatever the outcome is that you want. And in this situation, I would, for me personally, having been a teacher and then also being a parent now, um, we had first tried to discuss it through email. So for, well, for a few zones One can see if we can resolve it just through an email, and then two, so that there is a paper trail if it continues to happen. Because the definition of bullying, according, at least according to the schools that I was at when I was a teacher, was that it had to be something that was happening again. It wasn't just like a one time one kid's being mean to another kid. And so I want to be able to have that documentation so that if it does continue, there is more. More of a paper trail for consequences. Keep my kiddo safe now. I talk a lot about how AI can help with pretty much everything, and I hope this is an example of that. I hope you never have to use this prompt. I hope you never have to even think about this. I. Yeah, I. I just. Better to have it in your back pocket and not need it than to have to deal with something like this and not know what to do or how to talk to the teacher about it or how to, you know, solution together. What I would sometimes when I was a teacher, not really with the classes I had, but, you know, the teachers, we talked and stuff, but they would come in super angry, super frustrated, blaming the teacher. And so it's really hard to be in a place where you can both mutually come to a res, come to a resolve a solution for the child when the teacher is feeling attacked or feeling like they're in survival mode. Which, to be completely honest, as a teacher, I felt that way a lot. Not nurse necessarily, but just from out of control during the entire day. Like your day is dependent on a lot of factors, including any the administration might want to make, like adding in new students to the classroom, how the students were raised, how their behavior is. Did they have this that day? Did their boyfriend break up with them? Are their friends being mean to them? There's just a lot of factors that will impact your day as a teacher that have not really anything to do with your choices necessarily and everything to do with what's going on around you and the other 27 humans that are in your class at any given time, the other adults that are making decisions about your class, the legislation, legislation that's making decisions about your teaching in class that you might not have anything to do with to try to approach somebody that's already, and maybe yours don't feel this way, but I certainly felt this way. We had a life after teaching this for teachers that wanted to transition out of the classroom. We had that for, I think, prison and grew to over like 150,000 people. So I know I'm not the only one. But when you try to approach somebody that's in like a survival mode, fight or flight kind of thing, a lot like guns a blazing, you're irate, you're frustrated. It's hard to calmly be able to come to a solution. So my recommendation is to use ChatGPT to write the email to be able to firmly say, this is happening, this is not okay. How can we come to a solution together? If you do decide you want to have a meeting with them, to be able to come up with topics and whatnot as well. So I hope that helps. Talk to you all soon. My name is Brittany Long. I'm the creator of AI200K. And that's it for today.