How to prevent your child getting canceled

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When your child has canceled, what that means is a friend group or it could be an entire school, no longer support your child because of a perceived or an actual transgression that occurred. Imagine how stressful that is for a child, you’re being excluded by all of your friends, and sometimes everyone in the entire school and as an adult, that would be incredibly stressful. But as a kid, it’s even more so you just wouldn’t wish that on anybody. 

Be careful what you say so you don’t get canceled

We really need to explain to our kids, be careful what you say. So not everybody’s going to share your beliefs or your values. And that’s okay. But we want to try to be respectful of everyone and just, you know, keep a sort of standard protocol of treating everybody with respect. 

And if your child doesn’t have similar political beliefs is their classmates. If your family is different politically in your neighborhood, I would probably keep that to yourself, because it’s just going to make your child a target, whichever way their views are. And that can be really hard in the politically charged climate that we live in. Even in elementary school, a lot of families have found it to be a problem. 

And we’ve all seen it in the news that kids or teenagers have said stupid things, and an entire family has gone on to be canceled. 

Olivia was canceled and had to change schools

Let me tell you about Olivia. She’s a teenager, and she really likes African American culture. And she was dating someone from that culture. And she used a derogatory term. And someone caught it on video, and it was shared with the entire school and she was canceled, and she apologized for what she said she wasn’t racist. 

She had a lack of judgment using language. And people didn’t accept the apology. She was basically a social pariah. So she had to change schools. And she is known as the girl who made that derogatory comment when anybody thinks of her. That’s what they think of. 

And it’s unfortunate, because that’s not the full scope of who she is as a person. And she’s paid dearly for her mistake. She lost her friend group, she lost her boyfriend, and she had to move on and start all over again. 

Don’t say negative things in writing or video

Teach your child it’s important not to say things on video, or put things in writing that they don’t want to have shares. It is a good idea to make your child aware that whatever they say, in writing, or on video can be shared with other people, people can screenshot it, keep it on file and use it against you in the future. And this is tricky, because truthfully, we all know kids that kids, teenagers, adults say silly things. 

We just have to teach our children to be extra careful about what they say, and to use their words wisely. Number two, don’t get baited. And what I mean by that is, sometimes people will try to trigger or bait you to say something derogatory, and then use it against you. So what kids will do is they might say, oh, so and so said this about you, what do you think, and they’ll beat you to say something back, and then they will use that against you in the future. 

Don’t be baited into saying something negative that can get you canceled

It’s wise not to participate in idle gossip. And the other day, I was talking to Tori, and she’s a teenager, and she said she’d seen this happen in elementary school. But it happened to her in high school and Tori was friends with two friend groups. And a mean girl named Rochelle wasn’t happy that she was friends with the two groups and she baited Tory into saying things and then did just that shared them with the other group and twisted her words. And Tori was canceled. The the other group, the whole friend group, drifted away from her didn’t want anything to do with her because of a perceived transgression, which wasn’t even true. She hadn’t even said those things. But this girl was using it against her. 

We have to teach our kids just to be very careful. And sometimes people can betray our trust. We think someone’s our friend, but you just don’t know. So it’s a good idea not to go around bad mouthing anyone.

Don’t do anything shameful or embarrassing that people can share

And number three is don’t do anything bad that’s going to put you in a bad situation, or cause you shame. So For older kids, they go to parties, and we can’t control everything that goes on. But we can say to them, you know, you do not want to do anything that is going to cause you shame or embarrass you. You don’t want to be the drunk person at a party who has a lampshade on their head that everybody is sharing on social media, or laughing about you for years to come. 

You know, I’m sure your child is not involved in any of those things. But it would be worth having a conversation of what’s happened to some other kids, and how they’ve been humiliated by poor judgment, out events and how it can haunt them for years to come. 

And that even though they’re young, these are some things that they might want to think about. And trust me your child would rather have this conversation with you may get annoyed or find it awkward. Then to find themselves in a situation. I challenge you to sit down and have a chat with your child about being careful what they say, not to get baited and not to do anything that’s going to cause them shame or haunt them for years to come. And it’s unfortunate that we have to think of canceled culture, but this is the world that our kids live in today. Check out our video what is bully proofing to find out how you can help your child show up in the best possible way for challenging situations.

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