For The Child
July 11, 2005

Curing the Itch from the Inside.

It is a natural instinct for parents to react strongly if their children are threatened or bullied by an outside source. You can bet on it that if parents figure out who is causing their children’s anxiety and pain, they will jump at the chance to teach that someone a real lesson. As an adult, being fast to act upon certain situations is not necessarily bad, but when action is a result of impulsive behavior fueled by hatred or fury, we’ve got ourselves a bomb ready to explode.

While any situation that involves our kids coming home with physical or emotional scrapes and bruises brings forth a turbulence of concern, anger, and worry from within, addressing the matter with a clear and level head will do you much more good than harm. Stay away from “quick-fixin’s,” and instead seek solutions that shoot to the core of the problem or you will be, as the Chinese proverb goes, “scratching an itch outside the boot.” In other words, if you go and physically or verbally attack your child’s bully, you are, in fact, infecting the already problematic itch by perpetuating the act of violence, which started from child to child and now parent to child. If anything, the bully will be provoked to torment your child further when out of your supervision to make up for the humiliation you gave him or her from your few minutes of “revenge.”

There are, in fact, a few strategies that parents can employ to channel their anger towards minimizing bullying at school. First, it is essential to understand, as hard as this may be for those who have an injured child, the bully. In a 2001 study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), bullies tend to have difficulties with social and emotional adjustment that may stem from home-related circumstances and extend to problematic behaviors like fighting. Without intervention, as researchers have found, bullies continue on the road to using more severe forms of abuse and violence as a means to expel repressed feelings, which often lead to crime in the future.

If you thought the first step was hard, then the next few steps will ask much more of your time and efforts if eliminating violence and bullying is a top priority. Dan Olweus, Norwegian psychologist and known as the father of bullying prevention research, emphasized the need for a school-wide effort to address and prevent bullying on a full-scale. Having a few teachers talk about bullying in the classroom may have some effect, but it is pushing your child’s school administration to enforce strict rules and interactive programs that will sound the alarm bells ringing in everyone’s face. In 2004, a study was done on Tavelli Elementary School in Fort Collins, Colorado to assess whether or not the school has lived up to its reputation as a school with a positive learning culture that promotes "balanced education" catered to individual abilities. The study revealed that "an approach to education that includes character education, academics, and the importance of the whole child," as shown in Tavelli Elementary‘s school structure and dynamics, fosters the celebration of diversity and individual differences. With that said, you can be sure that bully-proofing is a top priority in the school‘s curriculum, as well as many other healthy ways that encourage respect for all cultures and abilities in a school setting. Learn more about what this school has been doing here and see whether your child‘s learning environment also welcomes diversity, respect, and personal motivation. (Download Just For The Kids PDF)

So how do you draw up a war plan to battle bullying at your child’s school? Here are a few suggestions that may guide you in the right direction:

• Educate yourself thoroughly about bullying. Find it here.
• Inquire about what your child’s school is doing to prevent bullying and problematic behavior. If the school puts on a variety of effective anti-bullying activities, then find out ways to be an active participant or assistant.
• Talk to you child‘s school faculty and arrange for anti-bully research experts or authors to come to the school to give presentations and discussion meetings for parents and students.
• Don’t find any programs addressing the issue of bullying? Take part in parent organizations or school boards and be proactive about voicing the need to establish a strict agenda to bully-proof schools. Check out the Olweus Bully Prevention program (Download PDF) to see if your child’s school administration is willing to go through with the program that has proven effective results. Here is the U.S. web site for the Olweus Bully Prevention program.

What ever you choose to do, the most crucial point to get across every student, educator, parent and school administrator’s mind is that bullying is never right and therefore, will not be tolerated under any circumstance. Start now and channel your rage towards alleviating that itch.