The Salt Lake Tribune reported last night that an elementary school in North Haven (Weber Co.), Utah will no longer require its 6th grade boys and girls to accept every invitation to dance at the school’s Valentine’s dance. This is not the romantic kind of dance we think of for high school or YSA – it’s an exhibition for parents and others of the dances that the kids have learned in their PE classes. Apparently half of the dances are boys’ choice, and half are girls’ choice, and in previous years the rules were that a child accept as a partner anyone who asked.
This rule was evidently intended as a sort of kindness. It’s tough to find the courage to ask someone to dance, and the school did not want anyone to feel rejected. (I seem to remember similar encouragement, but not rules, in Church dances when I was a teenager — “You should always give any boy a chance — they may be dorks now, but they may grow up to be attractive young men.”)
The unintended consequence of what was intended to be a good thing is, of course, that it reinforces the spoken and unspoken expectation, internalized by so many girls and women, that they must be nice, even at the expense of their own wishes and safety, and in particular that they have no right to control who touches their bodies and no right to refuse to activities that they are uncomfortable with.
It’s an unintended consequence, certainly, but a real one. It’s also why some parents are consciously deciding not to insist that their children hug Grandpa or kiss Aunt Maude on demand – not with the idea that children shouldn’t respect or be courteous to their elders, but because they do not want to condition their children to submit to unwanted touching out of fear or habit or expectation. How do you teach a small daughter that it’s okay – urgent – that she refuse to let her “funny uncle” touch her inappropriately after you’ve insisted that she kiss him goodnight?
All of this I understand and support. Unintended consequences are real. Nobody intended to condition children to submit to assault, but the problem has been recognized so we change the behavior in order to avoid the consequences.
Question for discussion:
We praise children who are kind to others who otherwise would not be part of a child’s circle: The popular child who invites the unpopular one to share the lunch table – the Young Men and Young Women who are encouraged to watch for the lonely and isolated kids and welcome them to meetings – the football team who “adopts” the special needs child as their team captain or mascot.
Are there unintended consequences for encouraging that kind behavior? I hope not, and I absolutely cannot see any. But why is it dangerous to condition girls to accept every invitation to dance, and virtuous to encourage boys to ask girls to dance whom they otherwise would not ask? Are we teaching them anything beyond the intended consequence of kindness?
Is it because they are boys rather than girls? (I hope not.) Is it because the one doing the inviting is somehow more powerful, and therefore protected, than the one waiting to be invited? (I don’t know.) Is it something else?
Again, I don’t see how – and hope it is not – it can be wrong to encourage children and young people to take the initiative in including everyone in their activities. But I’m having trouble figuring out a logical reason why, or at least finding the words to say so, should anybody claim there is a double standard. Help me out.
This is relevant to the whole #metoo discussion, including its manifestation within Latter-day Saint culture.
Meanwhile, be kind, and respect the sanctity of each others’ physical bodies. Even — especially — on Valentine’s Day.
When I teach I try to balance the different approaches to learning that students have. Some do very well with group work, others hate it and it prevents them from learning. If I go with a particular teaching style, there may be unintended consequences that negatively impact some students while helping others. It’s a trade off.
I try to keep a balanced approach were I use different styles of teaching to help bring in the students who respond best to a particular style of teaching. I know that when I do that I will not capture all the students all of the time, but I will engage with (almost) all students some of the time.
In this case there are two competing ideas that school administrators were trying to teach the students. A method of teaching students one concept may not be best for teaching them a different concept. If we insist on promulgating a single concept to the exclusion of others then, yes, we may solve that one problem, but then we are still left with all the other problems.
Just because a certain idea is being taught does not mean we cannot teach the other.
I’d like to comment on two things.
One, I agree with “encouraging” the youth to invite and accept, but certainly not to make it mandatory. Youth need to learn to open up their circle and include others, but forcing it is wrong as leaders don’t know what has gone on in a youth’s life to make them not want attention from certain other youths. They don’t know what has happened that a young man or young woman doesn’t want physical contact of any sort. Leaders need to be sensitive to the fact that they don’t know everything.
Two, I think your final comment summed it up: “be kind, and respect the sanctity of each other’s physical bodies.” Including others into our circle of friendship doesn’t require physical contact other than handshakes. I’m reminded of a story President Boyd K. Packer told in his book “Teach Ye Diligently” (that’s where I’m remembering reading it) — When he was a Seminary teacher he asked some of the more popular students to simply walk with some of the less-popular students to and from the Seminary building and include them in conversation. Friendships were begun and students who felt they had no place in the world found acceptance. This kindness and the friendship and “brotherly” love that developed was greater than any physical contact.
The original concept of Valentine’s Day wasn’t just to celebrate romantic love — it was to honor Love in any of it’s forms, and they don’t all require physical contact.
The difference between asking someone to dance and accepting a dance is the difference between acting and being acted upon. If a person chooses to ask someone to dance, that person is exercising his or her agency. It doesn’t matter if the motivation is desire, kindness, or something else entirely—the asker has made a choice and acted upon it. On the other hand, if a person is required to accept every invitation to dance, that person’s agency is denied. This has the potential to be especially harmful because it normalizes the denial of agency over one’s own body.
I don’t think there is a double standard. As you point out, half of the dances are boys’ choice, and half are girls’ choice. So, presumably, boys may also say no when asked, and girls are hopefully being encouraged to ask more than just the boys they already like.
I think it’s good to teach boys (and girls, for that matter) to have the courage to ask, and the strength to accept a rejection and move on. Not everyone wants to dance with the asker, or even to get to know them, and that’s okay. The message they get from everywhere else (like, every romantic comedy ever), is that persistence is rewarded, that rejection is an obstacle you can use to show someone that you really like them, and that once they see that, they’ll like you back. End result: guys making nuisances of themselves, then complaining that women don’t like “nice guys.”
Outside of dating/dancing/romance, are there unintended consequences for encouraging kind behavior such as a popular child who invites the unpopular one to share the lunch table? Well, children are more honest than kind, and I still remember the boy who told me “my mom says I should be nicer to you.” He was trying to do that, but he was frustrated by my own disinterest, I think. We were better friends a few years later, but at 11 or 12 we just didn’t know how to be friends without having more in common than we did. So, yeah, if you teach kids to watch out for the lonely and isolated kids as a favor to them, well, no one likes to be someone else’s project. The reason to expand your social circle has to be at least partially because it benefits you to have friends with diverse interests, not just because it benefits them.
““You should always give any boy a chance — they may be dorks now, but they may grow up to be attractive young men.””
I’ve heard a similar sentiment expresed about dating, that the woman should be willing to go out with the young man at least once — give him a chance. Oddly, from an unmarried woman.
I’ve heard it the other way, too: When I was single, a counselor in my student ward stake presidency, apparently gripped by the illusion that the fact I was about to graduate summa cum laude in physics meant I was a catch (see: dork), inquired very diligently after my dating habits to be sure I was doing my “duty” and asking out some of the girls who “were eager to date a good man but weren’t being given the opportunity.” I had good reason to believe that I was not generally regarded by the fair sex as a catch, and there were other distasteful overtones to the concept; but I kind of hemmed and hawed my way through a bland, noncommittal answer.
Had I thought of it at the time, I would have told him that a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell, that I’d already truthfully told him I lived the law of chastity and treated my dates respectfully (assuming that not having dates means you’re treating them respectfully; I hadn’t in some months at the time of this interview) and that my efforts to find a spouse were between me and the Lord, thankyouverymuch.
No, the standards arent’ the same. But they’re each irritating in their own way.
Blast, missed the closing bold bracket after “dork.”
I will add, since it’s Valentine: I did eventually find an intelligent and attractive girl to marry, which still flabbergasts me.
And I genuinely wonder whether she’s really better off married to me than remaining single. I feel like I got a much better deal. That’s not smarmy faux self-effacement, of the kind I detest when I sense it in Conference talks, by the way.
[I fixed the closing code; you’re otherwise on your own. 🙂 ]
Years ago, my daughter had a very uncomfortable, awkward relationship with some of the boys her age at church. She said that in one case, she had experienced a crush on a boy and made him uncomfortable by looking at him a lot. He retaliated with nastiness. She didn’t like it, but figured it was his right. In another case, she didn’t reciprocate a crush a boy had on her. Anyway, they mostly tried to avoid each other.
Unfortunately their early morning seminary teacher sensed this and desired to force them all to be friends by shoving them together until they liked each other. It didn’t work. A Sunday School teacher kept trying to pair them up (You’re going to be Lehi, and you’re going to be Sariah, etc.) which was also a disaster. My daughter was teased and harassed more than ever because of these misguided attempts.
It got so bad that several parents went to local leaders and begged for a seminary teacher who would just teach the material without attempting any social engineering. Fortunately we got one. Now, years later, these young people have attended college and served missions, and are friends who wince when reminded of how badly they treated each other. But the only solution was maturity, which had to come in it’s own time.
In a round robin badminton tournament, each player is expected to play the next person in line, no matter who it is. But there is always a net between them. When dancing the Virginia reel, each lady takes one turn with every gentleman in the line. That’s usually not a problem either. The challenge with social dancing is that there are layers of social implications tied to being paired for a dance. Dancing is often a stand-in for courtship, marriage, and even sex. It’s much riskier than being paired for a book report or a badminton game.
Even if the adults in charge don’t see it, the kids themselves may be aware of all sorts of awkwardness that might come for accepting a dance from someone. These kids are fifth and sixth graders. I can think of all sorts of reasons to turn down an invitation to dance. A kid might get the vibe that there is a mean prank or trick in the offing that an adult would never notice.
Part of the problem in my opinion is that adults seem a little too eager to pair kids off into boy/girl couples. While some kids want that, others really don’t. Line dancing and square dancing might be more comfortable for some kids this age.
My kids have suffered a couple of negative consequences from trying to befriend the lonely or left out. My son complained that when one neighbor boy shot him with a BB gun–and added that he was tired of listening to the boy’s dirty stories. I didn’t push that friendship any more.
My daughter had to cope with a new girl who didn’t fit in, but who decided that D was to become her best and exclusive friend–and set about driving away all of D’s other friends. This made it impossible for D to ‘include her in the group’ since the new girl just wanted the group to go away. So we discussed a lot of strategies for avoiding the new girl without appearing to. There was some pressure from other adults for D to ‘be nicer’ but they didn’t catch the way the new girl was trying to isolate D into an exclusive friendship. Fortunately, maturity resolved that problem as well.
I think the problem is with hard and fast rules about complicated things. Children should be allowed to discuss things that make them uncomfortable, and adults should listen and do their best to understand the situation from the child’s point of view. Everyone has to do things that make them uncomfortable, but the uncomfortable feeling is still a warning to be heeded.
The problem with Popular Kids “befriending” Unpopular Kids is the problem that can crop up with any assigned friendship. Which is to say, there is a level of social inferiority implied in needing to be befriended. It can take more social skills than many children have, unaided (or heck, even their parents) to overcome that.
As I have gotten older, one of the greatest gifts of my life has been simply being treated like a peer. Many of my church friends seem to regard me as a second-tier friend, whereas my work friends (none of whom are LDS) tend to be closer. I felt a little funny about that, but I realized that it was OK. I do see my work friends every single day, as opposed to once a week. I do still seek out interactions with other Latter-day Saints.
But if one of the quirks of our culture is that I will almost always be a little lonely at church, that probably means that someone else is almost always a little lonely at church, too, and I can seek them out and try to help them be a little less lonely. Yes, that does mean that I’m self-assigning friendships. But one of the great blessings of feeling friend-deprived for approximately the last four decades is that I’ve developed some mad friendshipping skills, which I put to use as often as I remember I should.
As a high schooler, I signed up for Model UN in a large city six hours away in order to NOT be available for a dance. It had nothing to do with anyone else, and everything to do with my own social discomfort. Does requiring attendance AND the “kindness” of saying yes to everyone do more harm than good? I can’t answer that.
When I was young the standard seemed to be that it was polite (but not required) for girls (and guys) to accept invitations to dance or for dates, unless there was a pretty strong reason to decline. And, of course, the young men bore the majority of the responsibility for inviting.
I remember sitting at a Church dance in a big circle of chairs, just talking and enjoying the music, when a young woman came over and accosted one of the young men in the group. The conversation went something like this:
“Why are you just sitting there talking? There are lots of girls here who are just waiting for someone to ask them to dance. It’s your fault they’re not having a good time. Get out there and ask somebody!”
“Would you like to dance?”
“No.”
I think this is a hard problem, and that there isn’t a blanket answer. The right approach can vary with age — dancing is a very different thing in elementary versus junior high versus high school, for example. And it varies from person to person. One may extrapolate “you must accept invitations to dance” to feeling pressured to allow guys to touch them in other ways, and that’s not good. But at the same time, many people will never get out of their comfort zone and befriend or help others without a lot of encouragement from parents or leaders or peers (like the aforementioned young man).
Maybe it comes down to more talking about how to adapt the message to individual situations? But I don’t claim to know how to do that.