Gossip And Social Responsibility
Oh man, did you hear about that guy in Ms Peterson’s class who was caught in the girl’s bathroom …? If your teen is hearing the end of this and then repeats it, they become part of the beast we call gossip. If they fact check the story before spreading it we could call them a journalist, but rarely is that done, even by journalists.
If you have ever played the school game grapevine*, you know how easily a story can get twisted and changed to suit the teller’s preference. There is something powerful about telling a story and having the attention of the listener. That attention feels good to the teller and the story they are telling becomes a way to get the attention.
Gossip spreads easily because of this attention and because it includes your teen in current events, even if those events are false. No one ever considers that the friends who are gossiping to your teen are the same friends that could be gossiping about your teen. The gossip beast needs the story and this doesn’t change because a “friend” is involved.
So there are a few things your teen should think about when spreading gossip:
1. At the center of gossip are people whose lives are affected in some way–more bad than good
2. As easily as your teen heard true or false gossip about someone else, the gossip can easily be about them one day.
3. A friend who gossips to you can easily be a friend that gossips about you.
It is nice to be the center of attention by telling a great story, but your teen should make it a habit to avoid it being at someone else’s expense. So maybe they aren’t going to fact check the gossip, but they don’t have to be part of what keeps it going either.
*Grapevine – a game played where a secret sentence is whispered into the ear of the person first person. The first person whispers what should be that same sentence into the ear of the second person and so on until the first person hears the sentence from the last person to receive the sentence in their ear. It is almost never the same sentence when this first person says what the original sentence was.
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