Living up to labels
My older daughters and I went with some friends this past weekend to see the musical “Wicked,” the untold story of the Witches of Oz. The story chronicled how Glinda came to be called Good, the Witch of the West came to be called Wicked, and the Wizard came to be called Wonderful. Notice that I said “called,” not “became.” The labels others bestowed upon them stuck, whether they were true or not.
It made me wonder how many kids are labeled early in life and end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a child is labeled a troublemaker in the classroom, his teacher expects him to have poor behavior most of the time. The kid known as the class clown often continues his antics to keep his title. The child who is constantly criticized comes to doubt her own abilities and becomes helpless, afraid to even try something out of fear of being criticized again.
But even positive labels can be a burden. The girl everyone thinks is amazingly beautiful comes to expect the constant admiration and affirmation from her friends and ends up using her so-called beauty to manipulate others to get what she wants. The child labeled a model student when good grades came easy now feels pressure to perform and deliver those grades at any cost — and starts cheating.
Labels can become a convenient excuse not to try harder, to do better or to change bad behavior. Most people merely do what is expected of them. If a child’s behavior is noticed by an adult – praise for an A+ paper, a trip to the principal’s office – the child now has an incentive to continue the behavior in order to keep getting the attention, positive or negative.
Labels can also be a form of bullying. Calling another child names – dumb, poor, ugly — in front of a group might make the bully feel superior, but the kid on the receiving end internalizes the label – “If everyone thinks I’m stupid, I must be.” Who wants to fight the uphill battle of proving them wrong?
I suspect that my oldest daughter has an auditory processing disorder, where she has trouble distinguishing sounds being spoken if there is too much background noise (I have the same problem). When she was in fourth grade, her teacher had such a Southern twang that often Kate missed what she was explaining. Early in the school year, I encouraged her to raise her hand and ask the teacher to repeat what she said. You can probably guess how this played out. The teacher got tired of repeating herself, kids started calling her dumb, no one would play with her, her grades took a hit, and I ended up having to reteach her each lesson from the textbook when she came home. (Hence how we ended up homeschooling.)
The one thing I didn’t do was rush off to the doctor to get a diagnosis (itself a label), especially since there is no magic medicine to “fix” her problem. If we had stayed in school, each day would have been a struggle as she not only coped with the problem itself but also the label the kids had slapped on her. I’d rather have her gain confidence in her abilities to do school work without worrying about what other people think. In the meantime, I also can teach her some coping mechanisms to compensate so she can eventually sit in a classroom and learn without the burden of a label dragging her down.
Have you or one of your children ever been labeled, good or bad? How did the label affect them?
Feb 9th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
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Feb 17th, 2010 at 10:13 am
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