With my son, the challenge often stems from his perfectionism and his literal interpretation of the rules which leads to very black and white thinking and the summation that others are breaking the rules and should be stopped. If we allow our kids to believe this kind of thinking is legitimate, it sets them up for a difficult future of feeling out of control of their own destiny, since we will never get everyone around us to play by our interpretation of the rules.
That isn't to say we ignore injustices or accept the status quo. The very visible women in technology movement is one such instance where not accepting business as usual is important. But even in that one movement, if women fought against every incidence of unfairness, it would paralyze the movement's momentum.
So our job as parents is to help our kids learn to discern the difference between extreme interpretations of fairness that are not reasonable or sustainable and how to cope within imperfect systems.
When my son comes home upset about some unfairness that occurred, I ask a lot of leading questions - do you think they understood the rules, do you think they all interpreted the rules the same way you did, did the teacher see them and get after them, were you the only one upset by the way they were doing it, etc. I try to help him discern if he was the only one perceiving things differently. If so, i help him. Understand he is the one who has to adjust his reactions. And sometimes through the process, he comes to the conclusion that the behavior was wrong and needs to be reported to an authority figure. Then we talk about what will happen when he reports it and how he should approach the issue. I try to help him predict the consequences of his choices not only for himself but for everyone involved. Through additional conversation, sometimes he'll decide the consequences are not worth the decision to tell someone in authority; other times he will decide it is important enough that the consequences will have to be accepted. And, if he is way off base, I interject more forcefully. Otherwise, I just help him through the process.
This approach has started to pay off. More often now, he is able to have this process as an internal dialogue. A couple of years ago, that would have never happened.
