The Telephone Game

Did you ever play the telephone game back in elementary school? You know, the one where one person comes up with a sentence and whispers it in the next person's ear. They then whisper it to the next person, and so on down the line. The fun is in seeing how the message comes out at the other end, garbled and silly.

Our daughter is a complete telephone game all on her own.

The other day I met with her teacher to discuss the issues DS is having in class, and what we want to tackle next. She told me that another parent had called the principal, concerned because our daughter had said on the playground that if you wore a "Hollister" shirt it meant you wanted to have sex with your parents.

Huh?

Well, at the time I figured it was some rumor that had been going around at her old school which she, with her literal mind, presumed was true. I vowed to discuss it with her when I got home. The next day in the car, I asked her about what she had said and heard, and she insisted that her teacher the previous year had told that to the class.

Double huh? I knew this teacher pretty well, and didn't think it was something she (or any other responsible teacher, for that matter) would have told a class full of impressionable 11-year-olds.

"Well, I didn't really understand it, but it was something about that the company takes pictures of kids having sex and then they tell their parents or something and then they buy it," was DD's explanation. "The kids were talking about Hollister, and I told them my teacher said something really gross and I didn't want to say it. But they really wanted me to and I really didn't want to but they made me."

I think I finally put together what actually happened. Last spring her class did a unit on advertising and persuasive writing. I imagine the idea of sexually charged ads came up, and the teacher may have used Hollister as an example of a company which takes pictures of teens in sexy, age-inappropriate clothing so that teens will beg their parents to buy the clothes. In other words, the usual "sex sells" advertising problem. Since DD didn't really understand that concept in the first place, she stored it as "pictures of kids having sex." Then when the kids "made" her tell (not like that is really all that hard), she popped out the beauty about kids and parents. It probably lost even more in the final translation - who knows how many kids passed that along before it made it's way to the principal and then to my ears.

Great... new school, and this is what the parents think I am teaching my daughter. Just great.

I have now added 3 more rules to DD's litany of "don'ts":

1. If you don't really understand something you heard, then you shouldn't be passing it along.
2. No matter how much they beg, other kids can't "make" you tell something you don't want to or know you shouldn't.
3. If something you are about to say has the word "sex" in it, keep your mouth shut, because it's probably not an appropriate topic for you at age 11 anyway.

Who knows what will come up next. I don't know about the rest of you parenting FASD kids, but I find that because of DD's lack of generalization skills, we have to cover the rules for every possible permutation of circumstances in order to ensure we don't get some kind of undesirable behavior. This is impossible, and we always end up with something we hadn't thought of. Oh well, maybe we'll have hit most of the permutations before she gets to 50.