Bullying. It’s Not a Tragedy, But an Opportunity

October 1, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

One key point I’d like to impress upon parents is that—strange as it may sound now—there can be something really positive about bullying.

Think about the times when you’ve felt really good about yourself. Go ahead: Think of a few examples of times when you felt proud of yourself.

Got it?

Most of the experiences that really build our confidence and self-worth aren’t just about winning. They’re about being on the bottom and finding our way up. Does that fit your examples? Maybe you were proud of a time you overcame an addiction, or passed a difficult test, or stood up for yourself to a boss who terrified you or survived a life-threatening situation.

That’s the whole secret to developing real self-esteem. It’s not about heaping praise on someone; it’s about those times when they were really down and figured out how to pull themselves out of it.

When they faced tremendous challenges and learned they were strong enough, smart enough, brave enough, good enough to overcome the odds.

So the first attitude adjustment I’d like you as a parent or caretaker to make is that finding out your child is being bullied or is a bully isn’t a reason to get hysterical. That’s the tendency—no parents want to see their children suffer, of course, and they can get pretty fired up when they find out their children are being targeted. I’ve talked to hundreds of parents whose first reaction is to cry, scream, yank the kid out of school, threaten to sue the school . . .

The truth is that your child is going to take cues from you. If you’re all worked up, the child will get all worked up (and that’s the last thing you want because it’ll just fuel the bully). If you rush in to shield the child and save the day, the child learns to be helpless. No lesson learned. No opportunity for growth.

Except in really extreme cases, the goal should always be for the child to have control of the solution. Of course, parents and other adults can and should help, but not take over and leave the child out of the plan. It’s important for the child to feel that he or she did something positive to get out of the situation.

That’s the only reason I can continue doing the work I do. If all I saw was misery and victimization, I could never be a bully coach and still be a functioning and happy person. But instead, what I see is an opportunity. I know that if I can help children learn the skills they need to stop being bullied, they’re going to gain self-confidence that will be with them for the rest of their lives. They’re going to feel like they’ve gone from being losers to being winners, and that feeling is the real power that can propel them to great heights.

Yes, bullying is something to take seriously, and no, I don’t expect you to shout “Hooray!” when you find out your child is being victimized. But I ask you to look at it as a challenge with great potential rewards. Teaching a child resilience is like giving that child keys to a magic kingdom. The world becomes brighter, the impossible feels possible, and future challenges don’t feel so hopeless.

Next, we’ll examine this opportunity and use it for all it’s worth. Know that even if the situation looks grim right now, there’s a real possibility that your child will grow from this and become stronger and happier than ever before. The greatest victories are the ones we struggle to achieve.

Long-Term Consequences of Bullying

July 11, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

Even when the bullying doesn’t end in broken bones or death, it can have long-standing consequences for all involved—the target, the bully, those who assist the bully or the target, and the observers.

You may have seen talk shows where formerly bullied kids come to say “look at me now” to their old tormentors. There’s something so sad about the fact that the bullies are still on these adults’ minds, still influencing them. Most can recall every humiliation, every taunt, and even twenty or thirty years later, they’re still trying to measure up and gain the bullies’ approval. Often, these are women who’ve had plastic surgery to “correct” a flaw the bullies picked on, or men who’ve become bodybuilders in response to jabs from bullies who saw them as weak or nerdy.

“Childhood is what you spend the rest of your life trying to overcome,” says Sandra Bullock in the movie Hope Floats. For many bullied kids, that’s about right. A three-year study by the UK charity Kidscape revealed that adults who were bullied in school are up to seven times more likely to attempt suicide than those who weren’t bullied.¹⁰ They’re also more likely to continue playing the victim role throughout their adult lives, getting bullied in the workplace, in romantic relationships, in their families, and in their neighborhoods.

Or they may “snap” and become the aggressors, now that they’ve learned that violence gives people power. The U.S. Secret Service surveyed the attackers in 37 recent school shootings, and discovered that more than two-thirds of them believed they had been bullied.” The desire for revenge doesn’t end when school lets out, though: In Japan in 2003, a thirty-four-year-old man learned how to make a bomb on the Internet, and planted it at the home of his former high school bully. He was badly burned when the bomb exploded early and was later sentenced to twelve years in prison.¹²That kind of anger was stewing inside this man for nearly twenty years after he was bullied.

As for the bullies, a study from the University of British Columbia found that 60 percent of children identified as bullies in grades
six to nine wind up with a criminal record by the time they are twenty-four.”

Then there are those who sided with the bullies even against their true feelings. Those people get to live with that guilt as long as they live.

“My older brother, Charlie, was retarded and always subject to bullying,” says Jim Fox. “About fifteen years ago, while calling on a business issue, a customer recognized my name. He asked if I’m the Jim Fox that went to Downey High School in Modesto. I am. He asked about Charlie, and I explained he’d passed away some years ago. The man began to weep and apologized for the treatment he’d subjected my brother to so many years earlier.

“He explained his own son suffered from Down syndrome, and every school day was tormenting for him. He apologized again and said he had always felt sorry for my brother but had gone along with the taunting so that he could fit in. After the man hung up, I realized the power of bullying and the incredible peer group pressure it exerts. This man himself has gone through life with a birth defect—a missing right hand—yet he bullied my brother ‘to fit in.'”

It’s never too late to reach out and try to make amends and apologize for prior wrongdoings. Although it was too late for this man to apologize directly to Charlie, it was still something his brother appreciated hearing. In many cases, it can help a target to heal, even many years later.

Social Dominance Theory

June 13, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

According to Social Dominance Theory, there is a hierarchy in all group situations. Someone’s always going to be at the top of the ladder and someone’s always going to be on the bottom.

Now, of course, no one wants to be the one on the bottom—therefore, they want someone else to be on the bottom. This is part of what explains the “do-nothing” bystanders and even those who participate in bullying despite their consciences. As long as people continue to shun someone else, they’re safe from being the biggest loser in school—a title no one wants to claim. 0.60

A man named Daniel says that his son, a second grader at the time, had become a target of the class bully, a boy who’d been left back about three times and was a lot bigger than his classmates. Daniel told his son to ignore the kid. “It didn’t work for him, but a week or so later, while sitting at the dinner table, my son proudly announced that he’d been able to figure out how to handle Henry: ‘I told Henry that if he would stop beating on me, I would help him beat up the other kids!’

“Needless to say, we quickly informed him this wasn’t an option.”

Daniel’s son was able to talk his way out of it and even reason with the bully that he should probably quit it now before he got to high school and wasn’t the biggest kid in school anymore and lines of people were waiting to pound on him. But you can see the logic in his initial thought—out of self-preservation, he was willing to help the bully terrorize someone else to get himself out of trouble!

Standing up for someone who’s on the bottom carries a big risk. It means that you could take that person’s place. You could look like a fool, could be laughed at and picked on and isolated. It takes a person with fairly high social standing to intervene and stop bullying alone. But if a group of kids take a stand, the bully is less likely to continue. It’s much less appealing to pick on a target who has a buffer of friends or allies.

Bullying Statistics – Where the Power Lies

May 29, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

Bullying Statistics: 85% Do Nothing

Bullying Statistics Where the Power Lies Statistics on bullying show that, on any given day in a classroom, bullies and targets usually constitute 15 percent of the population. That means that the other 85 percent of the children serve as observers in the bully dynamic. Interestingly enough, these observers may be the most powerful actors in the bully scenario, though all too frequently their power is passive, most often expressed as the absence of intervention or condemnation. Studies say that if bystanders do the “right” thing, they can reduce bullying incidents by at least 50 percent or more.

I have found that, more often than not, children want to do the right thing. My observations are echoed in a study of middle school students in Italy, where students watched videos enacting bullying scenarios: scenes where one person or a group bullied a target in school. After watching the video, the students filled out questionnaires about their opinions of the people in the video and who was to blame for the bullying. The researchers found that the children reported having positive feelings about the targets, and didn’t generally blame the targets for what happened.*

However, even if they feel sympathy for the targets, when they don’t act on it, they can become part of a group that permits or even encourages bullying behavior, and makes them enablers of the� bullies and complicit in the victimization. Over time, even these kids who don’t blame the targets begin to do so.

Rita’s Story

I am very embarrassed to admit this, but I was a bully in primary school. I was particularly cruel to two fatter kids and got the majority of my class doing small jumps in time with each step� the girls made.

I have agonized over this for a long time and have even tried to get in touch with them to apologize. I firmly believe that every action has a positive intent, so I spent a long time thinking about what I got out of this bullying. What was my positive intent? It’s a strange question to ask yourself, but I think the answer is that these fatter kids were also the smarter ones. They were the ones who did well in math and spelling.

You see, because I’m dyslexic, my spelling is atrocious and I got the numbers in the wrong order as I copied them down from the board (I never got the right answer because I had the questions copied down wrong). Every single Thursday, I spent the first half of lunch rewriting all the spelling words� and every Friday, I spent almost the entire lunch rewriting, incorrectly more often than not, the entire dictation, while the “fat kids” got to play.

From an adult perspective, I believe the constant spelling punishments were, in a way, a form of bullying from the teachers. Perhaps I was evening the score by punishing the fat kids for not being good at sports. Perhaps my bullying was a way of making the world fair and just. Sports were the areas I excelled at; I won everything and was on the school team for every sports team we had. I was fit and I knew it. They were not being punished for not excelling at the area I excelled at, yet I was being punished for not being good at their areas of excellence. I wonder if my bullying was about fairness?

Once I got to high school, and the weekly spelling test ended, so did my bullying.

3 Types of Bullying

May 7, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

There are three main types of bullying with different probable effects.

Physical Bullying

This is the one that’s easiest to identify. Punching, kicking, hair-pulling, bra-snapping, tripping, shoving someone into a locker— these can all be physical bullying episodes. Maybe surprisingly, this is usually the type of bullying with the fewest long-term scars for the target. Physical bullying has a beginning and an end. Once the� incident is over, the bullying is over for a period of time. Depending on who wins the battle, the dynamic can shift immediately—the target can knock out the bully and suddenly gain power and brush off his target status. That’s not exactly the ideal; most likely, the bully will just move on to someone else, and the target will either learn that fighting back is a way to gain power or feel sick about the event. But it does sometimes stop the bullying.

Mark was a boy with a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, going to a Catholic prep school when he found a Swastika taped to his locker. He’d been called “Jew boy” before and had been taunted about his religion, as well as his size (short and skinny). He usually just ignored the taunts, and today was no exception. He stuffed the Swastika picture into his coat pocket and forgot about it until his father found it later that night and demanded to know what happened.

The school took the bullying seriously—so seriously that the bully was suspended from school, even though it seemed that no one was happy about that idea. The boy was very popular, and once word got out that it was Mark’s “fault” that the boy was kicked out, the bullying kicked into high gear.

He was in the locker room one day when a big athlete began chasing him around the room, threatening to kill him. Mark ran like his feet were on fire.

“Then I saw a half-open locker door in front of me,” he says. “As I ran past it, I swung it hard behind me, and the kid fell to the ground. I just thought, ‘Thank God,’ because if not for that locker, that kid was going to kill me!”

And the bullying stopped.

But Mark reflects that he knew even then that this was a pretty screwy way to solve the problem. There’s a danger in retaliation against a physical bully, of course. What if—and this is usually the� case—the target can’t beat the bully? If the target takes the bully up on his challenge, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that the worst that’s going to happen is a black eye or a few bruises.

We have to remember that a large number of school kids today may have greater access to and awareness of weapons, and may, in fact, be carrying them. And what looks like a one-on-one challenge can turn into a ten-on-one fight.

But in typical cases, physical wounds heal. It’s when the physical bullying escalates or is combined with the other two forms of bullying that there’s more risk of long-term damage.

Verbal Bullying

Taunting and name-calling fit into this category. Boys and girls are about equally likely to verbally bully and be bullied. Boys may bully boys or girls; girls typically bully only other girls.

What starts out as a taunt based on truth can easily morph into taunting based on whatever seems to get a rise from the target, regardless of whether or not there’s any basis in reality. Maybe your child wears braces and kids call her “Metal Mouth.” They see they get a reaction from her, so they see what else they can call her to drive her up a wall. Doesn’t matter if she’s pretty and they call her “Horse-Face,” or if she’s an A student and they call her stupid; they’re not necessarily saying things they actually believe. They’re just saying things that trigger strong emotional and behavioral responses. If they see that she gets really upset when they say she stuffs her bra, it makes no difference if they actually think so or not—they’ll keep saying it because they see it upsets her.

They may find it even more fun to say ridiculous things they know aren’t true, because it shows they can get a rise for no reason� at all. No one actually believes the bully when he says, “I slept with your mom last night,” or “You got those shoes out of the Dumpster,” but his cronies will still crack up if it elicits a denial from the target.

And the target may tell the parent, “I just ignored him! I didn’t do anything to provoke him and he still kept it up!” But what this usually means is, “I didn’t say anything and I didn’t cry.” There are plenty of other ways the child may have reacted without even realizing it was a reaction—body language and facial expressions can be dead giveaways that a kid has been affected, and enough proof for the bully that the bullying was successful.

The target may have frowned or closed her eyes, folded her arms, bitten her lip, furrowed her eyebrows, run away, put her head down, looked away in an exaggerated manner, or any number of other cues that signify hurt or anger. Seeing the target really go berserk is the ultimate goal, but these little visual cues are enough to keep up the behavior to see if the target will eventually crack completely.

By now, most of us realize that the adage “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me” is a load of bull. The truth is that broken bones heal. Broken hearts are much harder to mend, and broken spirits can be lifetime handicaps.

And parents, no matter how many times you tell your kids, “You’re smart and attractive,” if all they hear from peers is “You’re stupid and ugly,” the latter is what they’ll internalize. They don’t believe you. You’re biased—and besides, you’re “old”! You’re not going to negate the effects of verbal bullying just by assuring your child that the kids’ words aren’t true. Something has to change within the child to make the message sink in: Who cares what bullies think? I’m okay. I’m special. And who I am is perfectly likable.

Relational Bullying

Most popular among girls but also rampant among boys, the goal of this sort of bullying is social exclusion. It can take the form of gossip and exclusion from a lunch table, team, club, etc. If done on an ongoing basis, this form of bullying is likely the most hurtful and most damaging long-term. The targets don’t just feel bullied by one person; they feel bullied by the whole peer group. It’s a very sophisticated and manipulative form of bullying. It is also hitting a girl exactly where she’s vulnerable—in her social likability.

Beyond about grade four, children’s identity and self-esteem are dependent upon their peer groups far more than their families. When they feel shunned by and cut off from their peers, their self-esteem plummets and they feel like they have no “safe place.” It’s the exact opposite of what they want at that age, which is a feeling of belonging. Gossip, whether true or not, tend to be extremely hurtful and runs rampant in the young teen population.

Former friends may stop making eye contact and be passing the target in hallways out of fear of being associated with this “social pariah.” The target may hear giggling as she passes by, or watch people move away from her when she sits on a bench or on the school bus. Her trust in her peers is shattered, and she’s likely to feel helpless and very alone.

It mimics the way a child feels when punished by being put in a “time out” corner. No words are necessary; the child is made to feel bad by being excluded from the family or group activities.

This is also what’s at play when someone has a birthday party and invites everyone in the class . . . except for one or two kids. That’s just plain mean, and I encourage you as parents to make sure that your child doesn’t contribute to making someone else feel excluded. The rule I find appropriate is half or all, nothing in between. The child can invite everyone in the class, or half the people in the class (or less), but not a number in between those two.

As a parent, you may say this is ridiculous. “Why should I invite a kid who may be mean to my kid?” However, following along with the exclusion mind-set just teaches your child to do the same. They think, “Exclusion is acceptable if my parent allows it.”

“I remember feeling like such a loser when everyone in my sixth-grade class got invitations to a girl’s party, except for me and one other girl,” says a woman named Arisa. “I was a new girl in school, but it was a few months into the year, so she did know me. I spent the day looking around the room and thinking, “She thinks every person in this room is cooler than I am.” Apparently, she kissed a boy for the first time there, so the party was a hot topic for months afterward. I felt so isolated. And it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more insecure I felt about not being part of ‘the group,’ the less able I felt to make friends, which meant I just got more and more lonely and an easier target for teasing,”

Sibling Rivalry and Bullying

April 17, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

Sibling boys having a fight, bullying on a sunny day Kids test out their power and aggression with each other first, generally because there’s a natural age imbalance, but how it develops and progresses is a function of parenting. If kids find out they can get away with it and aggression pays off, it will continue and turn into bullying.

Sibling rivalry is really just natural competition between siblings. Kids normally test out power issues with each other at home before they test them out with friends—it’s more natural to do it at home, and easier to do with siblings than with parents (they don’t bully their parents normally because there are clear consequences). It’s not a problem unless sibling aggression crosses the line based on a parent’s value system and parenting style.

Parents need to be really clear and upfront about what is acceptable and what isn’t. You can teach kids that conflict is acceptable, but that they need to use words that are not hurtful when they have an issue with their siblings, and that they may never harm someone physically. There must be consequences every time this is challenged.

Whenever you see kids getting too aggressive, you must step in and not let it escalate. Separate them, give them time to calm down, and see if they can work out a way to share and be more positive with each other. Otherwise, sibling rivalry turns into bullying and kids take those bully and target roles into the classroom, sports, camp, and elsewhere.

Birth Order

There are no strong studies about how birth order affects bully-jk ing behavior. It can be argued that each role in the family dynamic could contribute to bully or target behavior, depending on how the family plays out those roles.

The oldest child may bully a younger sibling out of jealousy—the oldest child once had the parents’ exclusive attention, and wants to prove that he or she is still more powerful. The youngest child may learn to bully others because he or she had to “grow up fighting” for power.
A middle child may feel lost in the family dynamic and bully others to draw attention—even if it’s negative attention. And, conversely, any of them could fall into target roles just as easily.

Why Are Kids Bullied?

March 14, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

Why Are Kids Bullied - Dr. Joel Haber Bullies will find any excuse to pick on a target. Too tall. Too short. Too fat. Too skinny. Too smart. Too stupid. Poor. An out-of-fashion haircut. Glasses. Braces. Different religion. Different race. Perceived homosexuality. Poor athletic ability. Flat-chested. Developing breasts early. A stutter. Teacher’s pet. Shy. Disabled. Any type of perceived vulnerability will make a child a likelier target.

One factor remains pretty constant, though: The way a child responds to bullying events will determine whether those events 0.60

repeat and escalate. The child who can laugh it off, walk away, and feel good about him- or herself anyway is not likely to become a long-term target. On the other hand, the likelihood of further attacks increases the more emotional the child becomes in reaction to the bullying. A child who gets very angry, cries, pouts, whines, or runs to a teacher is probably going to be harassed time and again.

That’s the scary part of the bullying equation: In normal conflict, kids self-monitor. They can read each other’s cues to know when they’ve crossed the line, and modify their behavior in response. That is, when two kids are pushing each other in the schoolyard and one kid starts to cry, the other will stop. The cue is received: “I’ve hurt someone,” and acted upon with empathy: “I don’t really want to hurt someone, so I’d better stop.”

Take that same situation with a bullying dynamic, and the same cue is acted upon in an opposite manner. “I’ve hurt someone” is translated to: “Cool. I have more power. Let’s see if I can really make this kid have a breakdown. This is fun!”

Those who are targets of bullies are more likely than other kids to do the following:

Develop social anxiety disorder as an adult²
Have few friends
Experience depression
Dislike their peers
Decline academically
Have psychosomatic symptoms such as headaches, sleep difficulty, bed-wetting, and stomachaches³
Think about or commit suicide, in extreme cases

Some targets “act out” and get in trouble with authority figures a. because they have a hard time controlling their emotions, particularily if they’re stressed out by being bullied. Bullies tend to be better at keeping their cool around authority figures, which often leads to the wrong person getting blamed (or both sharing the blame). Also, sometimes targets will drop out or purposely get themselves kicked out of an activity in the interest of self-preservation. Sadly, as many cases of school violence have proven, targets can also lose their empathy over time and become the bullies—retaliating with aggression.

What Bullies and Targets Have in Common

Both bullies and targets are more likely than other kids to witness violence between their parents at home/

They’re both more likely to have learning disabilities,’¹ have trouble regulating their emotions, be maltreated by caregivers,⁶ and abuse alcohol later in life.

Among boys, both bullies and targets are more likely to be obese than other kids.

Some people play both roles, too. A person who’s been a target may turn and become a bully, trying to get back some social power. Targets may find someone lower on the social ladder (or younger— like a sibling) to pick on to relieve their own feelings of power-lessness.

Who Are the Bullies?

February 19, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

Although most kids will “test out” bullying by testing out their power, the majority quickly discover they’re not cut out for it. A child proves to be a true bully if he keeps up the role for months or years, loses his empathy with these incidents, or if his initial forays into bullying are exceptionally abusive.

Note that bullies are not typically jealous of the kids they pick on, and they don’t usually have low self-esteem. That’s another myth—one that experts believed for decades until psychological tests showed that bullies typically had self-esteem to spare.

“When I was growing up, the stereotype of the bully was an overweight, overaggressive, not very intelligent boy who beat up on others to make himself feel better by proving his physical strength. There are still some of this type of bully out there, sure, but there’s a much more dangerous bully type now.

Today’s bullies are often popular, smart, charming to adults, and have many friends, even if their friendships are based on fear. They maintain their social status by making others objects of scorn and ridicule. To most people, they look like leaders. What bullies may not have is empathy, and that may be the most critical element differentiating them from kids with true leadership skills.

The thing that makes it so hard to deal with these types of bullies is that they’re often hard to recognize, and hard for bystanders to stand up to. People like them. Teachers are amused by them. Coaches value them. Their social skills enable them to sweet-talk and appear innocent to adults, and their peers are terrified of standing up to them when they witness bullying behaviors because they could easily become the next targets. Whether they admit it or not, nearly all kids want to be popular. They want to have friends on the highest rung of the social ladder. They’ll rarely contradict or confront a popular kid who’s doing something wrong because that would make them “uncool” and likely to lose social status themselves.

Because of this, the popular bullies learn that they can get away with anything, and their empathy declines. They feel more and more powerful and feel contempt for the less powerful kids. They’re likely to repeat this pattern throughout life in their workplaces, towns, and families—teaching their kids how to climb the bullying ladder.

Behavior and Traits of Bullies

Bullies are more likely than other kids to do the following:

Smoke Steal
Lack empathy Be aggressive
Vandalize property
Use illegal drugs
Cut classes
Drop out of school
Have aggressive friends
Have high self-esteem
Be popular

High self-esteem and popularity may be surprising qualities to see on a list of descriptions for bullies, but it’s such an important piece of the equation. Some of the most manipulative bullies get away with it because of this; we don’t pick them out as bullies because they don’t fit our mindset of what a bully looks like. If we’re going to be successful in tackling this problem, we need to make this part of our mindset. Some of the worst bullies have lots of friends and come across charming and attractive.

The negative behaviors become more problematic and rooted if the bullying continues. And the more popular a bully becomes, the more they feels they can get away with, and the more they looks down on those they targets. We need to let popular bullies know that the ways they’re getting power are unacceptable, and there are different ways to have positive power. Anything that increases a bully’s social power is very bad news for those they targets.

Why Is Bullying Getting Worse?

January 30, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

People sometimes ask me if there’s a “bullying gene.” No, not as far as we can tell. Is it because of neglectful parents, birth order, the media .. . ? Probably a little of everything you’d imagine. But it makes many people wonder why bullying is getting worse.

Babies are born with certain temperaments. Some are passive. Others are tense, aggressive, or bubbly. You can tell early on if a child has a disposition that’s prone to aggression—but that doesn’t tell you if that child will become a bully. Nature is one part of the equation; nurture is the other.

The Madness of the Media

The media is a hotly controversial subject when it comes to violence and bullying. There are those who argue for opposing sides of the issue: either that the media creates violent kids, or that the media has nothing to do with creating violence. I believe that the truth falls a bit in between: The media makes it far worse for kids who already have aggressive tendencies.

Bullying has been normalized all over television. If you take a good look at reality programming, you’ll notice how highly bully ing behaviors are prized. There are actually shows where thousands of people volunteered to compete for a job with an abusive boss. FOX’s short-lived My Big, Fat Obnoxious Boss, an apparent spoof on The Apprentice, was a prank on the contestants. They thought they were competing for an executive job with a company called Iocor, when in fact the company didn’t exist, and the boss was an actor. But they were put through degrading trials, inappropriate sexual remarks, unethical tasks, and verbal abuse in the hopes of landing this imaginary job—and we call this entertainment.

We also call it entertainment when Simon Cowell humiliates hapless contestants on American Idol, insulting them to the point of tears. Simon is rewarded for his verbal bullying with riches and fame. On Growing Up Gotti, young people watched and learned that the privileged boys can not only get away with awful behavior at others’ expense, but they can be on the cover of magazines, praised as heartthrobs.

Even television commercials are getting worse and worse. While growing up, children are subjected to thousands of commercials with violent content.

Add to that violent video games, song lyrics, and music videos. All children are exposed to some violence in the media, even if parents do their best to monitor a child’s activities. But not all kids internalize these messages the same way. Violent messages reinforce an already aggressive child’s belief that fighting is a good way to gain power. They do not make good kids “turn bad.”

Parenting Models

Are parents to “blame” when children are bullies or targets? Not always … but often, they have a lot to do with it.

Sometimes I see parents who tell me, “I don’t know what happened. I have three great kids, and one who’s a bully.” It’s pretty safe to assume that the parenting style is not largely to blame for the bully’s behaviors in a situation like that, though the parents may inadvertently be rewarding or reinforcing the bullying behavior.

But in many cases, it’s pretty easy to see where the child got the notion that bullying is okay. Bullying parents often rear bullying kids. And the way parents resolve conflicts between themselves creates a model for children—if one parent is usually “the winner” and the other is “the loser” in arguments, children can learn to identify with one or the other, thus becoming either the bully or the target.

In the next chapter, we’ll explore this dynamic more closely, and examine how your behavior as a parent may encourage bullying or target behavior . . . even despite your best intentions.

New Bullying Technology: The Internet and Cell Phones

Along with new communication technology comes a new opportunity for harassment. Some of the worst forms of bullying today are things you and I probably couldn’t even have imagined in our youth.

Kids today are being threatened in anonymous e-mails and instant messages. Rumors are spread about them on websites that
can be accessed by anyone across the globe with a modem. Embarrassing photos and diary excerpts are posted on message boards and forwarded among students.

They’re receiving threats and harassment by text messages on their cell phones. They’re participating in and victims of “three-ways,” where one peer sets up another peer to say bad things about a third person—who is actually listening in or reading the e-mails or instant messages.

New technology has made it easier for people who might otherwise be on the fence about it to become bullies. It also aids in the escalation of bullying. Anonymity demolishes much of the fear of retribution or consequences, and can even remove feelings of guilt or empathy—after all, the bully doesn’t have to see the tears in the target’s eyes when the humiliating words are received.

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Bullying Isn’t Just a Playground Problem

January 3, 2018 By Dr. Joel Haber Leave a Comment

For generations, we’ve heard and passed on the same advice about how to deal with bullies—and yet, the bullying problem seems to be getting worse, not better.

Maybe that’s because the advice doesn’t work?

Ignore the bullies and they’ll go away.

Bullying is a normal rite of passage.

Just tell the teacher and it’ll stop.

The bully will stop picking on you if you learn how to fight.

These are the lines we’ve been fed—and maybe repeated ourselves. But the truth is that, as adults, we know deep down that some of these comments are absurd.

What other kinds of problems are ever solved by ignoring them? What’s normal about feeling abused?

When I was growing up, bullying was assumed to be a rite of passage. If you got beat up on the playground, that was supposed to toughen you up and show you how to “be a man.” If kids called you names, that was “just teasing,” and you were told to ignore it and it would stop. And almost no one talked about bullying among girls.

The good news is that society is taking bullying a lot more seriously these days. The bad news is that it took tragedies like school shootings to make us wake up.

Bullying is abuse, and it carries serious short-term and long-term consequences for all involved: the bullies, the targets, and the observers. Nearly everyone can remember that white-hot feeling when a bully said something meant to humiliate, or the time you tried to will yourself invisible so a clique wouldn’t torment you in the locker room, even twenty or thirty years after it happened.

Nearly everyone can remember the poor kid who was at the bottom of the social totem pole at school, and many of us can remember wishing to help, but keeping our mouths shut out of fear of being the next target or looking “uncool.”

As adults, if someone harasses us, we don’t have to deal with that person anymore. But children are legally obligated to share space with their harassers at school all day, every weekday. It’s torment. And we owe it to these kids to help them feel safe, both physically and emotionally. Nothing is more important.

The cliches don’t work. But I know the tools that do work. If you know a child who’s hurting, we’re going to get to the bottom of it and help fix it.

To do that, we’re going to need to speak the same language.

In future posts, I will cover the core concepts of bullying: what it is, who does it, what forms it takes, and the consequences.

Stay tuned!

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