stop the phrase “tattle-tale”. stop indirectly telling kids that if they speak up about someone that’s bothering them, they’re doing something bad. stop contributing to the culture of abuse.
seriously though this NEEDS to stop. my mother. a grownass woman of 59. had to ask me over and over again if I was sure it wasn’t ethically dubious for her to go to her employer and report harassment and terror tactics from a coworker because she didn’t “want to be a tattler.” stop teaching kids not to be “tattle-tales” because they will not grow out of it.
I’ve seen kids at work get told to “stop being a tattle-tale” by the kid they told on. I’m sorry, but I’d really like to know if a kid is continuing to do something I just told them not to do for safety reasons. If a kid locked his friend in the cabinet by putting a lincoln log through the handles when I wasn’t looking, please tell me. That isn’t tattling. If someone is at risk of being harmed, or actually is being harmed, let someone know. If they get mad at you for that, they’re only mad because they got caught and they know they weren’t supposed to be doing what they were doing.
When I think “tattle-tale” I think of that whiny voice kids sometimes use to complain about things. Like the kind of really trivial things that aren’t actually harming the receiver and are better off ignored. Such as “she said she’s not my friend anymore (I don’t know what you expect me to do, tell them they have to be your friend or else go to the office?)”, or “he keeps looking at me”, where he’s only doing it because the child keeps responding to it and thus it’s amusing to keep doing it. But in those situations I tell the “tattle-tale” to try ignoring it, the kid will probably stop doing it, and if they don’t stop after a while to tell me/another adult and we’ll take care of it at that point.
With older kids (like, I don’t know, 4th grade and up or so?) it seems the word “tattle-tale” gets applied more to kids who legitimately report something that a child knew they weren’t supposed to be doing. Such as taking something without permission or trying to cheat or something along those lines. Cheating in particular is a big taboo to report, it seems. Most people I know hate cheaters and yet aren’t willing to say anything about them to the teacher, even in private, because if anyone found out they’d be harassed for weeks.
PiraticOctopus 