Creating a Just World for Kids

The concept of "quality time" was born in the 1970s, as a way to allow parents who wanted to "have it all" and "do it all" to balance family life, careers, and a full plate of individual interests. The idea was that if you didn't have a lot of time, at least you could make the time you have count. Later, detractors would note that you can't schedule a "quality" encounter, but that quality is a dynamic in a relationship that develops over time: quality may be a byproduct of quantity.

These considerations - are we spending enough time with kids, and is the time we spend valuable - are worthwhile. But I would suggest there is yet another way adults can invest their time that will inject quality into the context of their kids' lives - a gift that keeps on giving, if you will.

That gift is to be the dispenser and the ensurer of justice in their world. To back up a bit, one component of quality time - that is, the thing that actually makes quality time "quality" - is that it is redemptive. In other words, it is recovering lost value. It is replacing or reinstituting something of worth that is otherwise lacking. When we spend time with kids that is redemptive, they leave better off than they came in, because we've left them with something that lifts them or stretches them or grows them. To use a biblical metaphor, we've set their feet upon a rock, giving them a firm place to stand. (Psalm 40:2)

Justice is redemptive, because it restores an order and a fairness to a context where disorder and injustice are the norm. By establishing justice, we send a message that injustice, however rampant, will not be allowed to bully its way to the top, but that we're paying attention, noticing, and willing to exert correction whenever necessary. I'm convinced this is God's heart when it comes to injustice. He notices, he grieves, and he speaks, so as to remind the world that injustice does not reign, that it should never be accepted as the status quo. Unfortunately, we've sometimes been too busy or too apathetic to battle systemic, institutional sins like unjust power structures, or unjust treatment of prisoners, or racism, or torture. And the longer the church - God's agents of remedying injustice - is silent, the more injustice does become the norm.

What happens then is that the number of victims grows, because the doers of injustice believe they can act with impunity. Victims sometimes become oppressors themselves, because after all, if it's a dog-eat-dog world, you may as well exercise the advantage that you have. You may be thinking that I'm describing what happens in modern-day sex slavery, or exploitation of laborers, or caste classifications in India - and I am. But I'm also describing the world kids live in when adults unwisely retreat in the name of "teaching them to work things out for themselves."

If what constitutes "teaching them" is actually a constructive intervention, that's one thing. But if it's a refusal to act because the dispute seems downright trivial to us or we just don't care, we should bear in mind that such efforts toward self-mediated conflict resolution rarely result in justice. By refusing to intervene, we send a message that we really don't care about their social world (which is tacit permission to mistreat others), or that we are aware but we still expect them to put up with whatever unfairness is plaguing them because "life's not fair."

We can do better. Surely an attitude that injustice is an inevitable reality will produce kids who grow up to believe that - well - injustice is an inevitable reality, on whatever scale. The truth is that there are schools that have cut down bullying incidences, where teasing and put-downs are not acceptable, and in which it isn't good to be bad. This is accomplished not by meddling in kids' social interactions, but by the same means in which justice is established in the adult world: violators are brought to account, victims are given a voice, and the vision and value of establishing a just culture is reaffirmed.

As a kid who grew up on the receiving end of my share of mistreatment - and I dished out a good deal of it, too - there were times when I really wished an adult had taken notice and acted on our problems in getting along with each other. Instead, kid justice ruled. And kid justice is not justice. It rarely has in view the greater good or restoration for the victim, but is marked by retaliation and one-upsmanship. What's needed is a figure with enough common sense and authority to say, "No - this is how it's going to be." Some kids have the common sense. But few have the authority.

If we somehow establish justice among kids, we send a message that fair play and equal treatment of others ought to be the norm. They come to expect it, and to practice it. I used to believe it was best to turn away from kids' disputes and make them work it out on their own. It's too much of a bother and frankly, the things they quarrel about seem trivial. But I've changed. When we trivialize their concerns about fair treatment, we actually sanction injustice. Of course teasing and name-calling isn't as grave an injustice as slavery, and I don't mean to equate the two, but only to make the point that if we model a practice of inaction toward anyone's suffering but our own, we are teaching kids that to step outside of themselves and own someone else's injustice isn't worth the effort. Why would I bear someone else's problems when I've got enough of my own?

Remedying injustice wherever it happens is not a matter of becoming a party to the injustice. Rather, it entails bringing the offender to account, and empowering and restoring the victim. What does this look like, say, in the context of bullying? First of all, kids should be aware that bullying is not ok and won't be tolerated. This is more than a rule, it's a cultural expectation: using your influence to intimidate someone else is wrong. Secondly, all kids are taught assertiveness skills to speak up for themselves, first to the bully and secondly to an adult - who won't brush aside their concerns, but who will act out of a sense of duty. Third, while we would hope that empowering kids and communicating expectations would stem any harrassment, when bullying does happen, adults are willing to step in and address the problem directly. This usually means bringing the offender and the victim face-to-face, sometimes with a third-party peer, for mediation. These programs work and have been implemented successfully at schools. They work precisely because they are engineered by adult authority figures, and that communicates: "You've violated a norm, and we've noticed, and we're not going to let it stand, so here's our efforts to fix it."

Asking kids to keep problems to themselves when the problem is actually bigger than what they can handle is a terrible solution. We often fail to step in because a 10-year-old's problems seem so small: why can't they see that this isn't worth fighting about? But it is that lack of mature perspective that makes them unable to either rise above the conflict or work out an equitable solution. They need our help, not to do it for them, but to give them the perspective that they lack and the skills and - most importantly - the permission to face down an injustice and make wrong right. This is the gift that keeps on giving, because when they bring an expectation of fairness into all of their relationships, they are less likely to be bullied again and more importantly less likely to visit that torment on someone else.

It's easy to sit in an affluent American community and assent to the idea that injustice is wrong. The real test is whether we have the courage to look for it in the immediate contexts of our lives and fight it wherever it's found - even if that's in a place as seemingly insignificant as our kids' lives and their relationships with other kids.