A School Policy Nobody’s Embracing
As a guy who could use a hug, I can relate with the students at Nicolas Junior High in Fullerton. They’d gotten vibes from the new principal this semester that hugging at school isn’t appropriate, but after a couple students complained last week to the school board, the district loosened up.
A wise move. I was never hugged by another student in junior high, and it shows. The seed that with some hugging could have blossomed into a beautiful flower never did. Instead, I wound up in the newspaper business and suspicious of all advances toward me. Is this what we want for our youth?
The Nicolas students must have been confounded by the anti-hugging policy. If you spend any time at all these days analyzing the social patterns of young teens, you’ll notice they do an awful lot of hugging. They don’t ask why, they just hug. Telling them to stop hugging is like telling them to stop breathing.
Each new arrival to a group is hugged as if he or she had just returned from a three-week overseas vacation. To adults, watching this is irritating as can be, but in our more rational moments we have to admit it’s pretty benign. Who knows why they do it? Besides, what previous junior high behavior pattern has been decipherable to adults? More to the point, why should we oldsters spend so much time fretting over adolescent behavior, when our own isn’t anything to write home about?
Maybe, just maybe, the youngsters are on to something. Question for adults: Which workplace environment would you prefer, one in which putting your hand on the shoulder of someone of the opposite sex can get you hauled before a magistrate, or one in which you could hug the person? Whatever happened to kinder and gentler? Before we get too high and mighty about chastising our children, maybe we should ask if we aren’t simply jealous of them. Do we want to stop them from hugging because we can’t? Have we considered that maybe they’re hug-happy with classmates because they don’t get hugged at home?
Junior high students have enough problems as it is. Too old to be cute but too young to be taken seriously, they inhabit a way station halfway between child and adult. Again, I can relate.
I’m feeling especially beneficent toward junior-highers these days, because I visited a class of eighth-graders last week at Cerro Villa Middle School in Villa Park. Teacher Jay Turner assigned his students a paper in response to a recent column of mine and then invited me to listen in on their discussion of it.
Remembering my own junior high days and how we tortured all guests, I almost declined. But I went, and after spending two class periods with these 13- and 14-year-olds, I came away with one overriding thought: “They are much brighter than I was at that age.”
A lesser man would be upset by that revelation; I was encouraged. We hear so much about the quirkiness of junior high students and how raging hormones dictate their every waking moment. Perhaps, but if so, those hormones also produce some very articulate and penetrating thoughts. They produce students who think logically, at times poignantly, and who can then express those thoughts succinctly. They may not know all 50 state capitals, as I did at their age, but the best of the group were much more well-spoken and incisive than I ever was at 13.
Buoyed by their brainpower, I find myself now thinking maybe they can handle this hugging thing. If I were principal, I might convene a panel of some of the more respected students and ask them to come up with a compromise.
My guess is that the students would agree that hugs lasting more than five or 10 seconds are a bit much. Hugs in which the huggers wrap around each other like two strands in a sailor’s rope are a bit much. Hugs that begin as hugs and end up as mating rituals are a bit much.
Anything else, though, why not?
If, in that special universe peopled by 13-year-olds, the acceptable form of greeting--for this phase of the moon, at least--is the hug, let ‘em hug. Next year, the greeting is just as likely to be a three-fingered handshake or touching noses or bowing at the waist.
When it comes to being 13, it is not for us adults to ask why.
It is only for us to study them and marvel as they pass by.
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com
