Translator: Andrew Zink Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
It is a crease of the singular world,
a crease in the world that is not easily observable
by the adults that we have become,
and it therefore really frightens us.
I want to talk about the playground.
Our parental heart indeed sinks to
the memories of the cruelties that it contains,
of which our children could be victims.
However, if we remember that this place
is a particularly dangerous area for relationships,
we have obviously forgotten its codes.
We are too old.
But, our anxieties
regarding our children's attitudes towards relationships
still push us to sometimes put ourselves awkwardly
between them and this world that is their own,
thus transforming
simple relationship difficulties
into recurring problems.
For just about 10 years,
at a dedicated center, CRISS, I've been receiving
a number of young patients
and their parents who have been facing this kind of suffering.
The other day, I had Augustin's mom
tell me,
"Augustin was not invited to Lou's birthday."
I said to her, "That's too bad, but what did you do?"
"Not much, I went to see him and I told Augustin
how come you were not invited
when I checked that all your friends were."
He replied, "She's not my friend."
I told him, "Augustin, that's not the problem.
Friendship is important.
I'm going to ask you to question yourself,
and think about how you can do something
in order to be invited to the most birthdays possible."
I said to her, "Well, did that work?"
She told me, "No, not at all.
He is more and more stressed,
and getting less and less invites,
and each time we talk about it, he cries.
I am a little worried."
I am a little worried, too,
because indeed, you guessed it,
the risk is we release this worry,
to our children, precisely,
and we end up instigating
the exact opposite of what we wished,
that is to say, an uneasiness in terms of relationships,
a sort of inaptitude even,
and overall the will to think about it,
which is very bad;
friendship is like love,
you don't think about it,
you feel it.
It's the story of the millipede that was walking in the forest,
and that one day met a snail that said to it,
"I am so incredibly happy to meet you because
I've been wondering for so long how you manage to walk,
to put one foot, two feet, three feet,
four feet, five feet, up to one thousand,
without ever trippping over?"
The millipede thought about it and said,
"I don't know, I don't have the slightest clue."
And so the snail, a little vexed, leaves.
Then the millepede, wanting to leave as well,
begins to thing about the way he goes about walking
and he obviously fails.
This story is tragic
because, at this very moment,
a bird that was circling in the sky
sees this frozen little millipede,
petrified, flat on the ground,
it throws himself on the millipede and swallows it up.
And what I believe is that unintentionally,
we send little petrified millipedes
everyday to the schoolyard.
Small petrified millipedes
whose vulnerability, visible to the naked eye,
inevitably attracts more popular birds of prey.
What does it lead to? A paralyzed child in the schoolyard?
That leads to Bastien, 18 years old,
his class created a Facebook group
against him.
And every night, Bastien gets angry and cries
while reading the insults and slander that he's subject to on the web.
When he came to see me, he hadn't been at school for 15 days,
but, he told me, "I haven't told the school counsellor or my parents why
because otherwise, the situation wil get worse."
Children are lucid.
This leads to 15-year-old Julie
who became infatuated with a group that was more popular than her,
whose most popular girl in the group, Candice,
kicks her out, takes her back,
kicks her out, takes her back, and rejects her.
[Julie] feels very bad,
completely anguished when she is within the group
just to be excluded from it,
she grows depressed when she is not in it.
Her mom is in tears when she brings her to us
on a Wednesday afternoon.
It leads to Gabriel, 3 and half years old,
whose chubby cheeks and peachy complexion
inevitably attract little Salomé,
also 3 and a half years old,
who, 4 to 5 times a day
throws herself on him and bites him delightfully.
The nursery staff have definitely scolded Salomé,
who doesn't care
and manages to bite him surreptitiously,
as soon as the staff have their backs turned.
It leads to 6-year-old Lily-Rose
who came to CRISS and told me,
"I am just asking you one thing,
tell mommy to change my school,
because since the beginning of the year,
Kévin won't stop hitting me, he kicks me and punches me,
he booted me in the leg and yesterday, he put glue in my hair.
Please,
tell mommy to change my school."
What we've often observed at CRISS
is when an adult, however intelligent, benevolent,
and delicate they may be,
intervenes between two children
to try to sort out a conflicting or difficult relationship for them,
at best, it solidifies the situation, and at worst, it amplifies it.
That's because, by intervening, it sends two implicit messages
The first, to the bullied child, which is:
"You are truly inept socially.
You don't have any social competence,
The proof is that I have to intervene in your place."
The second, to the child aggressor,
and that is:
"You really found an ideal target
completely incapable of defending themselves, congratulations.
Bonus: You are also a true rock star
because you successfully got adults involved
with your maliciousness and nonsense."
Let's not forget that in high school,
getting adults involved
with your malice and monkey business
is a guarantee of popularity.
So we do things differently.
What we do
is we help the children
build, hone,
and then shoot verbal arrows
all by themselves,
arrows of resistance,
arrows of defense,
arrows to make it stop,
that suddenly make
the popular bird of prey
no longer want to face this little millipede
because they are taking an enormous risk
with their own popularity.
Because, contrary to what
our somewhat outdated psycho-babble thinking teaches us,
though we can still hear it on the radio and on TV,
our children don't get bullied
because they are ginger, fat,
or badly dressed.
Our children get bullied because they are vulnerable
and it's obvious.
To Bastien, we said,
"What could be interesting,
is you leaving a message on the wall of the Facebook group
saying, "I am still in the best position to know
What a pathetic and sad idiot I am.
So I am offering to take over,
and to let myself evaluate
the best posisions among you."
You could end by saying,
"I cannot thank you enough
for doing everything
so that I can be both your president and your idol."
The group obviously ended 48 hours later
from a lack of interest.
But much better than this even, when Bastien
returned to the hallways of his school,
no one bullied him anymore,
because you don't pick on a kid that can defend themselves so well.
To Julie, we said, "You see, the problem is
when Candice takes you back and then kicks you out, and takes you back,
and you accept it, she knows it,
and by accepting, you certify the enormous power she has
in front of the whole group.
Why would she stop?
What could be interesting
is next time that she rejects you and then comes to take you back,
you say to her, "I've thought about it Candice,
I can see that it's very important for you,
so I'm willing to be buddies with you, okay,
but friends, I don't think so.
Because we're not compatible."
Julie smiled.
One month later, when she came back,
she explained to us
that since she had said that to Candice,
she wouldn't stop soliciting her.
To the staff of the nursery, we said,
"Now, it would be interesting to tell Gabriel
that he can choose between remaining a big crying Haribo strawberry
or being a roaring tiger.
If he chooses to be a big Haribo strawberry,
then he will go on being bitten by Salomé,
and there's nothing you will be able to do about it, of course.
On the other hand, if he chooses to be a roaring tiger,
perhaps you could train him a bit.
And that's what they did, obviously,
since you can imagine that Gabriel didn't have the greatest ability
to roar to begin with.
The next day, they hid behind the little armchair
in which he sat regularly,
and when Salomé came,
they suddenly emerged from behind the armchair,
and all three of them let out a thunderous roar.
Salomé was startled.
Since then, she has stopped biting.
For Lily-Rose, it was more complicated.
We said to her, "You see, the problem is that if by chance
we managed to convince mom to change your school,
the risk would be that in this new school,
there could be other Kévins,
maybe they would be a little worse, or a little less worse,
we couldn't know beforehand, but what's good is that you,
you have Kévin #1 within reach to start your training.
So we have an arrow to offer you, but since it is very complicated
and you have to be an extremely courageous warrior to shoot it,
maybe you will not be able to use it.
As she was a little rebel, she told us, "Try me."
We told her, "What could be interesting,
is going to see Kévin and telling him,
"Hey, there's a really strange thing that people say.
They say that when a boy hits a girl,
it's because he likes her and that he isn't able to say it to her. Do you love me?"
Lily-Rose said, "I can't say that
to my worst enemy in the entire universe,
that I want him to like me or that he might like me
because I hate him."
"We really understand dear,
but if you continue like this, it's clear that he will continue.
But now you have the choice
to do exactly as you want."
Her mother told us that Lily-Rose prepared
regularly in front of her mirror the same night,
and also with her big sister,
who took great pleasure in playing the role of Kévin.
When she came two weeks later, for the second meeting, I said to her,
"How is it going, dear?" She replied, "Not well at all."
"Why isn't it going well at all?" "Because I couldn't say my arrow."
"Why couldn't you say your arrow, dear?"
"Because he didn't hit me anymore,
he gave me a big pink plastic ring."
I said to her, "Ah, that's not easy."
Our hypothesis was without a doubt correct,
what actually happened,
and this is 50% of cases,
Lily-Rose entered the school hallways
not trying to avoid Kévin and his looks,
or trying to blend in
like so many bullied children,
she came to school saying,
"Come and get it", while looking him in the eyes,
and he didn't come.
Because contrary to what many of you are thinking,
men are sometimes intuitive.
So, we often talk of school suffering,
especially these days,
we read it in the press,
we hear about it on the boards of education,
we hear about it even from the benches of the National Assembly,
but always, to find solutions external to the child
who is suffering.
Always to moralize,
to punish the child who is the bully,
it doesn't work but we continue.
It's that we do not have faith in the capabilities
of the vulnerable children to open up
to stop the vicious circles
of which they are the victims.
When I was little, I wanted to be a children's lawyer,
but there just is no such job,
so I decided to build with them, and for them, custom arrows.
What I wanted to say to you tonight,
is that it could perhaps be interesting
to get more people
seeing it in this way,
so that there would be less and less children getting depressed
in the school hallways.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)