Parenting Daily

One of my favorite websites (if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve noticed I’ve highlighted them several times in the last few days!), PsychCentral.com, wrote an article about an experiment in discouraging drunk driving.

It backfired. Big time.

I understand the concept. Make an impact by making “it” relevant to the students. You can probably still name some of the popular kids you went to high school with. The jocks or the academic stars, or whoever. There were certain kids who just stood out.

So this school in California uses this to its advantage. It thinks. One Monday morning, several of the most well-known students are absent from classes. A law enforcement officer visits classrooms and lets the other students know that these students were killed in a drunken driving accident over the weekend.

What do you think happens next?

Confusion, sadness, anger, shock… all the first emotions before the grieving process begins. Students are very, very distraught. There’s crying in the hallways, in the classrooms, students wanting to talk to the on-staff counselors. No one is getting anything done and it’s all anyone can talk about.

Can you guess the twist here?

The reportedly dead students are just fine. The school planned to reveal this during an assembly later in the day but moved the revelation up a bit because of the state of the student body.

Wow.

And the school defends itself in this CNN article. I really do understand that there are good intentions behind it. But a real lack of foresight, too!

If you don’t know it yet, peers are the most important thing in adolescents’ lives. Take away their peers and you take away part of what they think is their identity. Is it mature? No. But it’s part of adolescence.

What do you all think?

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