My reputation, Mommy, my reputation!

Label prescription drugs. Label food packages. Label backpacks and snow pants. But please, do not label children.

You know what I’m talking about. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in a playground or a school yard has heard how adults talk about children. “Watch out for Johnny. He’s a troublemaker.” “Stay away from Sally. She’s a wild one.” Insert the name and insert the label. A bully. A brat. A big fat baby. Or, simply put, That Kid.

For a variety of reasons, kids tend to get labeled very early at school, when they are just starting out and when their development varies dramatically from day to day. The boy who can’t sit still in class at the age of five is assumed to have a “behavior” problem, and the child who freezes during reading is tagged as stubborn or noncompliant. Tongues wag. Word spreads. And lo and behold, pint-sized kids are walking around with indelible marks on their foreheads. No matter what they do, they are likely to be blamed whenever some minor — or major — indiscretion occurs.  Crash, boom, bang. Something breaks, and all eyes turn to That Kid, who may be in a completely different place in the room.

You don’t really need a study to realize how harmful this is, but researchers in the U.K. just released a report about the phenomenon.

“Reputations can start to solidify within the first term,” said Maggie MacLure, professor of education at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-author of the study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. “Teachers will have decided in a broad way what kind of child this is. Is it a good child? Things that contribute to reputation are often very public. A lot of what happens is in whole class settings – so if children are disciplined others see it happen.”

The result, said MacLure, was that other children and their parents started to view the pupils in a similar way. She said teachers were well-intentioned but “the views form quickly in quite a nebulous way. If children go on to another class, their reputation could transfer with them just because one teacher writes a little note saying ‘This child has difficulty concentrating’ or ‘This child won’t sit still’.”

via School infants too easily branded as ‘naughty’ | Education | The Observer.

Now, little children don’t walk around like Cassio, bemoaning the loss of their reputation. But small as they are, they can easily perceive how adults view them. They catch on quickly that they are not invited to parties or included in afterschool gatherings. They realize that they are blamed all too easily and that their behavior is viewed more harshly than that of their peers. And they wonder why. This can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. If a child repeatedly receives the message that he or she is expected to misbehave, the child will unconsciously start to live up to those expectations. And that’s a sad thing.

I remember a boy in my second or third grade class. I’ll call him Peter. He stood about a head taller than all the other kids, and he stooped self-consciously as an attempt to dwarf his difference. He was awkward and kind of shy, but he always seemed to get blamed for any indiscretion, no matter where he was. Maybe he did something silly on the first day of kindergarten, who knows, but by the time I knew him, all the teachers thought of him as That Kid. One day, another boy stuck a pencil in Peter’s ear. He yelped in pain, poor thing. When the teacher intervened, guess who got blamed? The kid who used the pencil as a weapon? Nope. Poor Peter. That Kid.

I wonder what happened to him. I hope he was able to shake the label and is now thriving. Maybe he’s a rocket scientist. Maybe he grows organic food in some bucolic setting. Or maybe he’s a pediatric psychiatrist, healing others’ wounds. Whatever he’s doing, what happened to him as a child was unjust.

It’s in our human nature to put people into categories, but it’s time to stop doing this to little children, who internalize perceptions but cannot necessarily verbalize what is happening to them. Let’s do away with labels and look at children for who they are. That kid, after all, is just a kid.