> If there was something that you could have done yourself to prevent or stop it, would you refuse to do it?
I still don't know.
"Do you go Ender's Game on the bully?" As an adult, I don't want to condone violence, but at some point, it seems like there must come a point where one must stand up & defend oneself. The problem is that you'll very likely get in trouble for it — self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators. (Aside from Ender's Game, there are some good episodes of SG:SG1 that touch on this topic. It is complex even for adults. The permissibility of violence in this situation is likely conditional on authority figures having turned a blind eye to the situation. The level of nuance here probably exceeds what I'd expect a child being bullied to be able to command. The other problem is that bullies don't always operate alone, and a fight one decides to pick might not be a fair one.)
But like I said, it's besides the point: to a degree, yeah, you should teach children to have a "thick skin". But "thick skin" only gets the child so far: it can fend off mild amounts of verbal abuse, but I do not think a child can be effectively taught to deal with repeated, long-term verbal abuse, social ostracization, and physical abuse, and to deal with the emotional consequences thereof. At that stage, bullying is a failure of adults to discipline, in so much as it is allowed to happen and moreso and in particular, to persist.
> self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators
While this is true, it's also obviously wrong, and the fact that it's widespread in our society makes it even more wrong. Rather than try to expound that in more detail, I'll just reference a post by The Last Psychiatrist that does the job better than I could anyway:
"[W]hat kind of school doesn't want a kid to stand up to a bully, especially when they're doing it to help someone else? What kind of crazy school wants you to back down-- and get someone else to protect you? What kind of school indoctrinates kids that power is only possessed by a) bad people; b) the state?
> While this is true, it's also obviously wrong, and the fact that it's widespread in our society makes it even more wrong.
Just to be clear: I don't agree with it. All I'm saying is that child-me understood that it wouldn't be a valid defense after the fact, i.e., that there would be consequences. That, of course, affects one's decision making.
That article is very real, though. (But … and I get this gist from other comments on the thread: that article's example is a mild bully. But yeah, that's how public schools react, and how they inadvertently teach.)
I certainly hope nobody's talking about going full enders game. I think most people are talking about giving as good as you get and proportionate response. Not being afraid to take a punch or get a black eye.
If someone's talking about a real psychopath willing to break bones or with a weapon, the only real responses to run and any martial arts with class will teach you as much.
Thick skin is just quiet suffering unless it is backed up with real confidence and an actual sense of self-worth. Unless you're an award-winning actor, a boy can still tell if they're getting to you.
> I think most people are talking about giving as good as you get and proportionate response.
The goal is change, i.e., to end the violence. That's the same motivation as Ender. (I shouldn't imply Enders-game levels of violence, sorry, I meant more the metaphor the book sets up: Ender ends the conflict, which is a mirror to his larger role in the plot.) My point is that, had I engaged in violence — I never did, but do I regret that decision? how should I advise a youth? IDK… — I'm not fighting to win that fight, I'm fighting to win all fights.
(And, as I said in the original comment, I think the question of what the child should do is itself wrong. By the time a child is thinking whether violence will or won't solve the problem, the alleged adults in the room have already failed the child. It should never have gotten that far to begin with.)
A number of commenters in this thread also seem to have the popular media trope of a bully as their impression, which is a fair bit watered down. As the paper states,
> poor outcomes throughout the life span, including mental, physical and socioeconomic difficulties.
"Throughout the life span". It has permanent, enduring effects, and I don't know that pixels on a screen capture the mental anguish bullies leave in their wake.
> Thick skin is just quiet suffering unless it is backed up with real confidence and an actual sense of self-worth.
That's a good way of putting it. Unfortunately, I think the years it takes to acquire that mean you're not going to have it until after it's too late. (Or more realistically, I think bullying set back a child acquiring that sense of self-confidence and self-worth.)
> Unless you're an award-winning actor, a boy can still tell if they're getting to you.
Of course I would. I feel as though this is a false dichotomy. It isn't either/or. I wish I got the help that I needed and that adults took it more seriously - not going into detail, but I ended up almost dying because of it.
The study literally says that you should ALSO help the victim build resilience, it never says that we should stop preventing bullies from bullying. You are creating a strawman here.
I would take it 1 step farther, if you're not teaching your children how to deal with bullies themselves then you're harming them for life.
There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to.
You sound like you have never met a real bully. Just because a kid is mean and tough doesn't mean they're a bully.
Actual bullies have a very keen sense of how the victim might fight back and what it would cost them. And they go ahead with the bullying - breaking down a person, because they can - because they know the victim can't effectively fight back.
> There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to.
And the next step isn't to start arguing about what does, and doesn't, constitute a bully.
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The way my mother tells it, I started crying when I got into the car after school and wouldn't tell her what was going on. After the 3rd day in a row she got very insistent, I finally told her and she never left that parking lot before having it cleared up with the school. They removed me from her class and put me in another class with a teacher named Mrs Parker (whom I adored).
You're mistaken if you think my argument is that there aren't situations in which the parent MUST step in.
Yeah, that sounds like a situation where you needed someone else to stand up for you, and I think that's a lot more common.
If you can get out of it on your own toughness alone, it probably wasn't bullying. It's part of the definition of bullying that it's one-sided, that the victim has no good ways to fight back.
If they DO have a way to fight back, it's called conflict, not bullying. It's of course possible that one side in a conflict is a big jerk, a wannabe thug, etc.
One of the big conclusions from bullying research is that treating bullying as if it was conflict (e.g. teaching kids "negotiation strategies") makes things actively worse.
I don't care what you call it, if person A starts mistreating person B and person B knows how to deal with these situations, person A will quickly stop mistreating person B.
Your argument here appears to be that bullying if person A doesn't eventually fight back. I don't agree with that, but I'm not willing to argue over the names of things.
I don't have a clear answer but definitely they should know you have their back, it certainly makes it easier if the child knows you'll support them in it (even when they perhaps did the wrong thing).
Outside of that, they need to be taught that buttholes exist and dealing with them is a fact of life. They shouldn't start things, but they definitely should end them. That was the metric for us while in school, especially if we got into "fisticuffs".
I think for you it's important to understand that school and teachers can't be trusted. I'm not saying teachers suck, but shitty teachers exist. My middle brother once had a teacher take a dislike to him because he corrected her in class. I once had a teacher that would make me stand out in the hall behind the coats on the coat rack. My mother showed up at the school for both, I was pulled from that class and put into another class with a teacher named Mrs Parker, whom I absolutely adored. I still remember the song we would sing at the beginning of class (about parking cars).
My point is that if your child is having an issue with a teacher, don't assume it's the child, my experience is that it very often wasn't. You build trust with your children by SHOWING them that you're there for them. Of course, that doesn't mean every poor interaction with a teacher is the teachers fault. We were dirt poor so I suspect that had something to do with it as well.
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Anyways, none of that is really concrete, I don't know that concrete advice really applies to a question like that. Imo, kids learn what you teach them even if you don't know you're teaching them, and there is no such thing as a single glorifying lesson, it's a slow march over time, exactly as you would do to build trust with someone.
I keep wondering what you think bullying is, at the school level?
Because at my level, it was physically violent - and I was not in a school where this was considered "a problem". Everyone knew who the bullies were, and there was a collective culture of silence because the school could not possibly enforce proper physical safety on the grounds or around it. You avoided them and stayed away from them, because they absolutely knew who they had a physical edge on, and were absolutely willing to do nothing but escalate.
We don't need to "teach children to deal with bullying" we need god damn physical security around and within schools, and a panopticon of surveillance to make sure that justice happens swiftly and accurately.
I knew one kid who stood up to the bully and then was jumped by the whole gang after school. They used steel pipes to break a leg and knock out teeth. Of course there were no "witnesses" as "snitches get stitches" in that old neighborhood.
Now... i was also heavily bullied at school and at some point my solution was to show everyone of the "gang" (not in the US sense... more a clique of 13 - 15 year old wannabe-gansters) that i am total psycho. I waited for weeks until i got the chance to grab the main bully alone and unprepared, surprised him, beat him heavily while keeping total silent while doing so only to tell him afterwards in a somewhat calm way that it could be weeks, months or years, but i would GET him if he continues to harass me.
Worked for me, never had any problems with his clique afterwards.
Teaching children to deal with physical bullying includes self defense lessons and also involves teaching them not to be passive if they witness physical bullying.
Maybe the bully is the biggest kid in class but it won't matter if every kid knows how to defend themselves and also every kid will team up to pull them off of someone.
And then the bully, because for some reason they're still in the school - because you seem to think its "going too far" to enforce the rules in anyway other then mob justice - cries about how it's unfair, and then jumps one of the kids at the bus stop after school.
This is a stupid idea that doesn't scale, and continues the cycle of victimization: the victim gets to take on all the risk of physical retaliation. Maybe the next punch kills someone? It's impossible to know. Now they get to be on trial for murder while everyone declares they "just don't see how little <bully> could have deserved this".
An 80 lb kid who "knows how to defend himself" against one weighting 150 still loses the fight. The benefit of defending oneself is mostly that the bully often moves on to easier pickings after pummeling the one who fought back.
Yet some school cultures are entrenched, and extend from the broader community. If people are taught from everywhere else that bearing witness is dangerous then groups of bullies will have free reign. Changing that culture can be like pushing a rock up hill.
Solutions may have to be drastic, like electronic surveillance or sending troublemakers to different schools.
A panopticon of surveillance? That’s absurd. Anyway, a lot of bullying actually happens online these days. It can be much more effective than physical bullying.
Why is surveilling schools with cameras absurd? A societal panopticon is, but visual surveillance of an entire school, surrounding streets and buses? That's already happening, it's just not coordinated. We've pushed the responsibility onto kids with cellphones, so school authorities can pretend they "don't know" what's going on.
It’s traditional for a father to teach his son that he should defend himself. He may lose the fight, but respect is gained. And, you’d be surprised, many bullies are actually cowards and will fold early.
There are many novels directed at young people that show how to behave in these situations. It’s not clear that anyone reads them anymore.
It’s important to work these things out early in life, before the “events” get too serious. Refer to the Wikipedia article on “The Dozens”.
(I have no idea how mothers traditionally taught their daughters to stand up to bullies, but I’m sure they did.)
You should learn about bullying from science, not from out of fashion novels. Try out your intervention in a dozen randomly selected schools, try a different one (or do nothing) in the others.
This has in fact been done, and nothing resembling your approach, what one might call the "Manhood YouTube channel" approach, has done well at all.
You propose people, other people, should do a specific thing. That's an intervention you're proposing.
Yes, I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread the book that is school bullying 101, "Bullying in school: what we know and what we can do", Dan Olweus, 1991. It contains the results of the first large scale intervention studies on preventing bullying in schools.
If there are skills that could be taught to children to prevent their own bullying, would you deny them?