Mean Girls and Bully Boys: If Your Child Is Bullied
Posted: Saturday, February 02, 2008
by J. Louise Larson
http://familyrootsandwings.blogspot.com/
It's Not Natural
One of the fundamental mistakes adults make is to assume that bullying is simply a natural part of life.
"Teachers, like parents, don't recognize that bullying does affect kids for life," said Jodee Blanco, author of Please Stop Laughing At Me. http://jodeeblanco.com/ "The worst thing a parent or teacher can say is, ‘Ignore it and they'll go away.' It works in the adult world, but in the world of teens, if you ignore it, it makes the bully work that much harder and makes the bullying escalate in depth and dimension."
What You Can Do About Bullying
Here are some practical steps to take if your child is being bullied:
- 1) "Aggressively seek another social outlet for your child. Go one town over, because you want your kid to be exposed to new kids. Call the park district, the chamber of commerce, the YMCA, the community center, the library. Look for organized activities for kids and teens and find an activity your kid would enjoy, where they can meet new kids. Give your child something to look forward to - so, on those lonely, frustrating days there are new friends to share activities with," she says. "A renewed, more confident child is harder to bully. Once you get involved with these other activities, make an effort to meet the other parents and socialize as a group to help support the new social nucleus your child is developing."
- 2) "Beware of sibling rivalry - it breeds victims, bullies and bystanders, and it's a fertile practice ground where bullying takes root. If left unchecked, bullying creates a numbing effect. It disables the empathy mechanism," Blanco says. If you decide to get the help of a health care professional to help your child deal with the aftermath of being bullied, Blanco suggests having the entire family go to the first session, and making sure the professional is not an advocate of "tough love." "The child who's being bullied already has it tough enough. The bully obviously has it tough enough, because that's what's motivating them to be mean," Blanco says. Without using other techniques, relocation is not enough. "Who you are goes with you wherever you go and your kid could feel like a failure twice," she says.
Here are some steps you can take to help your child overcome a tendency to bully.
Rather than punishing a child, expose them to the joy of being kind. "Compassionate discipline is the key," says Jodee Blanco. "If a kid acts up, they're doing so because something else in life is already punishing them and they're acting out. When you punish a kid who's bullying, you're just make an angry kid angrier and they will take their anger out on an outcast, someone who's socially expendable," she says.
One of Blanco's favorite "compassionate discipline" techniques is to put the student who bullied on a one-week compassion program. Each day for a week, they have to go out of their way to do one nice thing for someone else. On paper, they then document the incident, writing a paragraph about what they did, a paragraph about the person's response and a paragraph about how the response made them feel. The student doing the program must write the name and phone number of the recipient on the paper, and the parent then follows up by spot-checking with a few calls to verify.
"Bullies suffer from empathy deficit disorder. We need to find innovative ways to discover their own empathy and develop it like a muscle," Blanco says.
A student who gets in trouble at school for bullying a child with an eating disorder can be taken to meet patients in a facility for patients with pediatric eating disorders or do a project online about eating disorders.
When a group of Blanco's high school peers ganged up on her for sticking up for a Down's syndrome student, they "whitewashed" her with snow, pushing snow down her throat and shirt. The ringleader in the incident was suspended from school for 10 days - and, when he came back to school, he had dropped 10 pounds. He was hungry and school was his source of food. "His dad had lost his job - he wasn't being mean to a kid, he was angry about being hungry. The principal never asked him why he behaved in such a way, never gave him an opportunity to share what was going on," Blanco says. Furthermore, with his inner conflicts unresolved, he was bent on retaliation, and when an opportunity arose, he pushed Blanco out into traffic. "The principal should have exercised compassionate discipline, driven by curiosity," Blanco says.
A more appropriate disciplinary scenario? Start a nonintimidating conversation with the student. "That's not like something you would do -what's wrong and how can I help you?" When the kid confessed to being hungry, the principal could have gotten the family into an emergency food program. He could then have had the troublemaker give up study hall time to do volunteer work with the special-ed students "so you can understand why Jodee loves those kids."
"Let's exercise some curiosity so we can figure out why the kid is acting out and expose them to the joy of being kind and being generous," she says.
For other articles by J. Louise Larson on bullying, check out these links:
http://raisingthinkers.blogspot.com/2008/02/mean-girls-bully-boys-why-cant-we-all.html
http://raisingthinkers.blogspot.com/2008/02/mean-girls-and-bully-boys-cyberspace.html
- J. Louise Larson - J. Louise Larson http://raisingthinkers.blogspot.com/
This Article has been viewed 451 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.