Life Notes
By Stacy Hawkins Adams
Theme: Parents can help their children overcome bullying.
Bullying is as ancient as Rome, and many parents can recall encountering one or witnessing one in action during their youth.
That doesn’t mean, however, that adults know what to do when children they love become victims of a peer’s chronic teasing, intimidation or physical aggression.
Stan Davis, an author, elementary school counselor and expert on bullying prevention, says parents first must assess the seriousness of an offense and help their children do the same.
“The question is how unacceptable you think the behavior is,” said Davis, of Sydney, Maine. He operates www.StopBullyingNow.com, a website designed to help schools and parents end bullying in their communities.
“Kids are going to do some low level mean things to each other – that’s the way life is,” he said. “Somebody’s going to stick their tongue out or say they don’t want to be your child’s friend anymore. (In this case,) I tell parents to tell their kids, ‘If you see someone always being mean to others, pay attention, because I don’t want you to grow up and marry someone like that.’
“Then there’s behavior you don’t want your child to just forget,” Davis said. “It makes them feel really bad about themselves, or it’s just something you don’t think someone should have to put up with, like somebody calling a kid names. You might ask your child to try ignoring it or telling the other child to stop. That’s middle level stuff.
“Then there’s something more serious – somebody calls your child a name because of (his or her) race, family income, body shape or disability. You may decide that your child shouldn’t have to deal with this and at that point you go to the principal or teacher.”
A parallel experience for parents is the workplace, Davis said.
“Maybe there are some people you could connect with, but they never invite you to lunch with the group, or somebody is always criticizing your work, or somebody is starting vicious rumors about you or sexually harassing you,” he said.
Just as adults have to weigh the seriousness of an offense and decide whether to pursue the matter, so do children, with their parent’s help.
It’s a balancing act, Davis said, because “we don’t want to say to our kids that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them while we’re (raising them). That’s not preparing them for life.”
At the same time, he said, anything that’s keeping them from feeling safe or being productive – someone taking their homework, for example – would be considered as problematic as a co-worker causing you to miss an important deadline.
“The hope is that we as parents are modeling for our children that we’re not always on the aggressive when we get slighted nor that we are unassertive when people really do interfere with what we’re doing.”
And what if your child is the culprit?’’
“I would lose the idea that your child is a bully,” Davis said. “Your child may be using bullying behavior. All of us have been mean to another person at one time or other in our lives.”
Still, Davis said, if parents learn their child did something wrong, they should make the child take full responsibility.
“The child should be able to say, ‘I did this thing,’ without the ‘but’ or ‘I did it because….’ One way for parents to help with that is for parents to say, ‘You had other choices; you are responsible for the choices you made.’”
There should also be appropriate consequences for children who have bullied someone else, and those children should accept that their punishment is warranted, he said.
“They need to own that they had detention because they called someone a name instead of saying they had detention because ‘They’re all jerks.’”
A third important step in staunching bullying behavior is to help children recognize the impact of their actions on others.
“Parents or teachers can ask them, ‘Tell me what you saw on the other person’s face or what the other person said or did after you did that,’” Davis said. “We want to teach our children to pay attention and realize that when they do something and other people react in a certain way, that means they feel that way.”
The key for parents at both ends of the spectrum is to communicate with their children and appreciate that the coping or empathy skills they help their youngsters gain now will serve them well forever.
“Other people are doing things all the time we don’t like,” Davis said. “Sometimes we let it go. Sometimes we take it up with the person in some way. That’s a level of decision-making we have to do our whole lives.”
© Stacy Hawkins Adams
For more information:
Websites:
www.stopbullingnow.com
www.kidsagainstbullying.org
Books:
- Schools Where Everyone Belongs: Practical Strategies for Reducing Bullying by Stan Davis
- Bully-Proofing Children by Joanne Scaglione and Arrica Rose Scaglione
