Your son was teasing another boy

 I don’t know what I’ll tell my son when he is teased at school.  I don’t know what I’ll say if he is the tormentor.  I do know that this; he will be both the teaser and the teased, as these things are cyclical.
I worry in this society of everyone is equal, everyone gets a trophy, there are no winners just participants what I will say to my son when he is teased or when he does the teasing.  I worry that we are developing a sort of social communism that in a pure form sounds idilic but in actuality it is impossible to accomplish and only fosters more devious forms of torment.  I worry because I wasn’t raised this way and I don’t believe that its the way to do things.  But how to voice that in a world that doesn’t agree with me.  Surrounded by a school system that would argue hard the other way and flanked by sports teams that have to remind parents not to yell obscenities at 8 year olds.
I don’t know how I will react as we enter this new stage of parenthood.
My son teased a boy at daycare the other day.  He and this boy are two peas in a pod, behave like brothers and true boy fashion can torment one another a bit.  My son apparently didn’t do anything physical but wouldn’t stop teasing his friend so he was brought inside until he could calm down.  I agree with daycare’s assessment and response to the situation. I don’t want my son tormenting anyone else, nor would I want him to be tormented.  However it raised the question in my head … what am I going to do with this.
My sister, jokingly said when I told her the story, “you know what we call that …bullying and that’s a legal term.” My sister works in the school system and she has literally been instructed to let parents know that bullying is a legal term .. yikes! I don’t want my kid shoved in a locker, I don’t want him to physically or emotionally damage another child.  But YIKES teasing, otherwise known as bullying is a legal term.
When I was a kid teasing was just part of what was done.  There was a social hierarchy and depending on where you were in it in any given month determined how badly you were teased.  There were a few months in junior high school where every time I walked by the boys table to go out to recess after lunch they stood and moo’ed at me … yep moo’ed every single day for months.  It was lovely … and no one stopped it, my parents weren’t told. There were no meetings called.  Eventually I got boobs and they left me alone …
I acknowledge that children are cruel, that in the process of learning how to behave with one another they do terrible things to one another. I fully acknowledge that this has become a topic of hot debate and that social media has added a whole new level of cruelty and access to one another.  I think that children need to be monitored heavily while using social media. I could never imagine what some parents have gone through with their children having been tortured by classmates.
However, it makes me nervous that those situations will affect what I would argue is natural healthy behavior.  Teasing is normal, it is supposed to happen.  We are supposed to educate our children on what is correct and appropriate behavior.
I guess that’s probably part of the problem, some don’t educate, some don’t realize, some don’t care and most don’t know. Think about how little your parents did or didn’t know about what was going on with you at school.  My parents were not of this new generation and didn’t flock to parent teacher conferences like flies to meat.  They didn’t know everything that happened at school because I didn’t tell them. That was my world and I didn’t want them involved.  Today’s generation is not like that, there is an expectation that the parents will be heavily involved in all aspects of the child’s education. At least until college where at that point they will refuse to tell you anything.
I’m rambling I know, I guess there is no resolution to this little diatribe.  I don’t know what I will do when I have to have this conversation in a more formal fashion.  Hopefully at that point I will have figured it out and I’ll happily take suggestions from those that have been there.