Always brushing it aside as tattling can create a climate of silence. What may seem trivial to us can be a big deal to them. Simply telling them not to tattle doesn’t give them the skills they need to solve the problem.Ĥ. Legitimate Concerns: Students face problems that affect their life and the lives of their friends.
#PSYCHOLOGY OF A TATTLETALE HOW TO#
They might not know how to respond in a certain situation. They may also be testing to see if they will be heard or brushed off with a “Stop tattling.”ģ. Limited Problem-Solving Skills: Students in our classroom often don’t have the skills they need to deal with the problems they face. Child Psychologist Jerry Wyckoff wrote, “Tattling allows a child to one-up another child, to gain favor in the eyes of her parent or teacher.”Ģ. Testing Limits and Boundaries. Some students want to see if you are consistent in enforcing the rules. To gain favor, exert power, boost self-esteem, or just get attention. So, instead of silencing tattling altogether, we can begin to look at tattling in a new way. Often they’re simply following the ‘no tattling’ rule they learned at home or in school at a young age.” We are often surprised by children’s silence in these cases, but we shouldn’t be. But the witnessing children told no one, and their silence emboldened those experimenting with bullying to go even further. Frequently we see reports of school officials who uncover bullying and learn that many students knew of prior incidents involving the same children.
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They write, “Such inadvertent but powerful messages clearly work against the culture of emotional and physical safety we want to establish for our children. The Responsive Classroom brings this problem to light by illustrating for us the dangers of discouraging all tattling and thereby creating a “culture of silence.” So how do we handle tattling in our classrooms? On the other hand, we certainly don’t want to feed into the tattle machine. On one hand, we want to help our students feel heard and validated so they know we are a safe person for them to talk to. It seems like every day there is an endless stream of students reporting behaviors or incidents that happen in the classroom.