Monday, July 18, 2016

Mom’s Note Calls Out 3 ‘Mean Girls’ in the Kindest Way Possible




Michelle Icard, a parenting expert and mom of two, was grabbing her usual cup of tea at Starbucks on Monday when she overheard three teen girls at the next table trash-talking a girl they knew.

“They were bashing her over what was clearly a popularity issue – and they were talking about gifts they’d received and how tacky they were,” Icard, who is the author of Middle School Makeover, told People. “They were so loud, and I was crawling out of my skin – I was so physically bothered by what they were saying. I kept thinking, This is going to stop; one of them will say something to redeem themselves. But it never happened.”

Icard struggled over whether she should say something. Eventually she left the coffee shop to do her grocery shopping. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the incident. As she drove home from the supermarket, she saw the girls were still at Starbucks. So she dashed home, wrote them a note, and went back to the coffee shop. Icard even ordered the girls three mini Frappuccinos, handed them the note, and left. She wrote about the entire incident on her blog and shared it on her Facebook page.

“I sat near you today in Starbucks and listened as you talked,” Icard wrote in her letter to the teens. “You three are obviously pretty and hardworking. I wish your kindness matched your pretty exteriors. I heard you talk about a girl who sang a song about being lonely in the talent show – and you laughed. About a girl who couldn’t be lead singer because you got all the votes, about crappy presents other people have given you … and you sounded so mean and petty. You are smart and you are pretty. It would take nothing from you to also be kind.”

Normally, Icard said she wouldn’t focus on a girl’s appearance, but she wanted to “speak their language” to make her point. “I also wanted to point out that having a ‘pretty card’ only hides bad behavior for so long before people see past it,” she wrote. “In high school, being pretty is still high value, and I wanted to call attention to that.”


Icard also purposefully chose to write a note rather than confront them in person because that would be publicly humiliating and would put them on the defensive. “I didn’t want to do that, but I did want them to take a moment to think about how their public behavior and loud conversation could impact people around them and also impact how they are perceived,” Icard tells Yahoo Beauty. “I’m reluctant to call them ‘mean girls’ because I think that’s a hard label to overcome, and any of us could be on either side of this equation during our lives. I wanted them to have the opportunity to reflect on how their behavior matters.”

She didn’t stick around long enough to know whether the girls laughed off her note or if it gave them pause, but Icard feels good about her decision to go back and say something. “Perhaps it’s true that I overstepped my bounds, but I have to believe that there is still room in our village for lessons from strangers with good intentions in their heart,” she wrote on her blog. “I didn’t want to shame them out loud or put them on the spot. But my hope is that maybe, just one of them was only going along with the others, and tonight she will think about that in a meaningful way as she’s falling asleep.”


b2 hours ago
One day I was in a store, there was a girl talking on the phone. She thought she was something else, for 10 minutes you could hear her trashing this one girl. Finally, I had enough, walked over to her and said, "You should be careful slamming someone and keep mentioning their name, she is my cousin and I don't appreciate the way you are trashing her!" Her mouth flew open and her mother was stunned. I looked at the mother and said, "You are the other part of the problem, teach your child manners and treat others the way you want to be treated. By the way, I took a picture of your daughter to show her who is trashing her and to return the favor."

It was funny! I didn't know the girl being trashed, but it made the mother and daughter think that before you go off about someone, make sure no one who knows them is around.
Evil has a way of coming back and biting you in the butt!!!
  • K
    KAY
    KAY2 hours ago
    Bravo!
Jun. 10, 2016 Secretly Filmed Nude Snapchat Drives 15-Year-Old to Suicide:


A family in Tampa expected to be celebrating the completion of 15-year-old Tovonna Holton’s freshman year at Wiregrass Ranch High School, but instead they’re preparing her funeral — and it’s all because of cyberbullying.

The teen used her mother’s handgun to take her own life this past Sunday after finding out that friends had allegedly filmed her taking a shower and posted it to Snapchat without her permission, according a report by Tampa news channel WFLA. “I said, ‘My baby! My baby!’” a visibly distraught Levon Holton-Teamer, Holton’s mother, recalled through tears in a video for WFLA. “I couldn’t get in the bathroom … so I tried to get in, and I look down. I seen a puddle of blood.” Holton-Teamer told the station that she tried to save her daughter by applying pressure to her head before dialing 911.

The grieving mother added that she had gone to the school repeatedly to report Holton’s ongoing bullying, but “wasn’t always satisfied with the responses she got.” She was thinking of pulling her daughter out of the school before Sunday’s tragedy occurred.

  • So what can we do to prevent these senseless deaths — and curb the off-the-rails phenomenon of cyberbullying? “It’s vital that parents actively participate in their children’s digital life to help them stay safe online,” warns a spokesperson for the U.K.’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. “The NSPCC’s Net Aware guide gives parents the support, advice, and information they need to have the right kind of conversations about the online world.”But Nancy Lublin, founder and CEO of the Crisis Text Line, says social media isn’t the problem, people are. “That was a very, very bad judgment call by her friends,” says Lublin. “Social media companies can be good agents in these situations by (a) providing an easy flagging system so that issues can be caught quickly and (b) partnering with orgs like us. For example, we work with After School, YouTube, and others to help provide a custom in-platform solution.”
    The list goes on and on.

  • Some of the most high-profile cases of teens committing suicide after being bullied online include Amanda Todd, who posted a now-famous video to YouTube about her abuse — most notably, a Facebook profile her tormentor created featuring a topless photo of her — before hanging herself a month before her 16th birthday. Tyler Clementi was an 18-year-old student at Rutgers University when he jumped off the George Washington Bridge in 2010. Clementi’s roommate had outed the teen as gay by secretly filming him kissing another man and posting it to Twitter.

  • The personal tales of teens who have killed themselves because of cyberbullying are almost too numerous to keep up with. This month, 15-year-old Shania Sechrist hanged herself in her Pennsylvania family home after being harassed on Facebook and through text messages. In January, David Molak, a high school sophomore in San Antonio committed suicide after being relentlessly bullied, primarily on Instagram and through texting. According to Heavy.com, the bullies were actually threatening to kill him. One message read, “We’re going to put him six feet under.” His tormenters were not prosecuted because of insufficient evidence.
  • Suicide due to cyberbullying is sadly not uncommon. According to DoSomething.org — “one of the largest global orgs for young people and social change” — victims of bullying are two to nine times more likely to commit suicide than average kids, and almost 43 percent report they’ve been bullied online. Most shockingly, 90 percent of teens who have witnessed cyberbullying say they’ve simply ignored it.
    It’s unclear which report is correct, but WFLA says that the case is currently under investigation by the sheriff’s department.

  • A more recent report by the Daily Beast claims that it was actually Holton’s ex-boyfriend who shared the nude video on Twitter in an act of revenge. Holton’s “longtime pal” Christian Coyle-Watts told the publication that the couple had broken up Sunday morning after a series of fights and that “Tovonna’s Snapchat recording was meant to be a “body appreciation” post before the ex-boyfriend allegedly published it.

  • stinge88
    stinge8827 minutes ago

  • I am so over Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and their ilk. We have all of this incredible advanced technology, and yet, as a society, we are not advanced enough to use it properly. I have been in the counseling field for over forty years, mostly working with teens. I always, at some point in the process, have the "selfie" talk. Some will admit to it, most will not. Some guys and girls will carry compromising (and usually illegal) snaps of them elves or bf's and gf's in their phones, forgetting that, a. once you're on the Internet, you're there forever, and b. someday you may lose that phone. And this was an act of revenge for breaking up? Why? Doesn't the perpetrator have any sense of how wrong this is? I guess not. Well, now he has to live with it.
    And what is this "posted it without her permission"? She's 15! She can;t give permission! It's child pornography. The boyfriend might well be in big trouble for possessing the video and for distributing it. Her life is gone. His life of misery is just starting.

  • Jun. 17, 2016 "Google Search: 86-Year-Old Grandmother's Polite Search Phrasing Retweeted More Than 30,000 Times":
    May Ashworth's grandson Ben tweeted a photo of the search, which included the words "please" and "thank you." In response, Google UK tweeted, "In a world of billions of Searches, yours made us smile."

Jun. 20, 2016 Man holds captive 12 girls: It's pretty disturbing.


Jun. 21, 2016 Preschooler picture:

When Stacey Wehrman Feeley snapped this photo of her three-year-old standing on the toilet, she thought her daughter was being funny, and wanted to share it with her husband. But when she discovered that this was part of a lockdown drill the young girl had learned at preschool, in the event that she be trapped in a bathroom during a school shooting, she took to Facebook to express her frustration. 

My opinion: This is sad.


Jun. 29, 2016: What about putting Justin Bieber or Donald's Trump's face?

I got a flashback of gr. 8 gym class.  We were learning archery and the gym teacher Miss. Taylor put her own picture up as a target.  It was a light and fun joke.

Jul. 5, 2016: I guess if it was my face, I would be offended.  It really depends like if I was with my co-workers and friends and we all went to a golf course together.  My face and other co-worker's faces were there as a target, it is a balance.
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