I'm not sure what this would actually accomplish. I've been seeing articles lately where bullies are just ignored by schools even when repeatedly reported by parents. It seems like universal advice on this topic is unreasonable to begin with. I recall in high school where the school would only get involved when something too big to ignore came up like some kid getting thrown through a window or something (this happened twice). I think the only advice I could give a child going through this is to fight back and fight back hard even if that means more short term pain. I don't think this is necessarily good advice but it might be the only option when the schools ignore these problems as a matter of de facto policy. Of course you could always home school and avoid this problem entirely :)
I remember the advice my family gave me before the first day of school. If anyone messes with you beat the hell out of them, if you have to don't hesitate to use a chair, make an example out of them.
Now here's the funny thing: I am not kidding or exaggerating!
Long story short, some kid looked at me wrong, I threw him against the wall and he slid down just like you see in cartoons. That was in first grade and I've never been bullied.
on reflection, the actual advice I gave my son was that if anyone ever hit him, he had my permission to hit back if necessary to defend himself. If a bully sees someone isn't willing to be a victim, they tend to move on to an easier target.
This seems highly context dependent. In the SF schools I've been in, you'd get your ass handed to you by 8-15 other people if you did this to the wrong person. Also, if you hit someone with a chair you're going to get expelled, even in the public schools.
Will you also teach the child how to fight? Many victims have little or no clue how to do this. If you are going to promote a methodology, you should also teach/train it. Otherwise, your advice is empty and frustrating.
I'll add that fighting back need not involve the same aggression expressed in the bullying. (Something else that may need to be / should be learned.) It is a matter of taking control of the situation -- and/or of your role in it -- rather than of becoming equally or more abusive. And there are techniques for that. In any given situation, they will not be full proof. But they may help the potential victim to regain a sense of control; a crucial aspect, I would argue, in resisting the bullying.
Unless you have a kid with absolutely no motor skills whatsoever, it's not about teaching him/her to fight, but teaching him/her when to fight.
Will someone else be a better fighter that you child? Guaranteed. But winning the fight isn't the point. The point is to convey the knowledge - both within your child and to others - that sometimes, the act of losing with respect is more valuable than actually winning, and that even if the challenge is seemingly impossible, you still need to do what is right to "defend" what is yours.
There's a lot more than that obviously, but by teaching our kids not to fight, ever, we are missing the chance to teach them immensely valuable lessons about life.
(PS: I do understand that these situations can vary, and I'm speaking from the average bully scenario. There are cases of severe mismatch that could result in major injury that of course would need different reactions by the parent.)
What I've told my kids is if they are being bullied get help from their friends -- not to fight back, but to help remove them from the situation. This is a difficult concept for them to grasp but I've been fortunate that my older son is friends with the bully victim so he's seen how this can work.
What I suggested, and what he has done, is when the bully was picking on his friend to immediately go to his friend and get him out of there. He calls him over from a distance, or tells him he needs his help some where else. This is pre-planned with his friend so it occurs quickly and naturally. And you know what: It worked. The bully moved on to someone he could get a reaction from.
Its hard to tell from the article but it sounds like the model to follow is this kind of approach.
That approach seems compatible with the article, but if it didn't readily resolve the conflict, the article wants your kids to come to you, for you to go to the principal, and for you to make it clear that the principal --- not the parents --- is expected to decisively and permanently resolve the problem.
The article defines "bullying" as repetitive, implying that whatever your kids are doing to try to address it, the conflict isn't resolving itself.
What's the value in teaching children how to respond physically to low-grade physical violence? It's not valuable in adult life. Corner a coworker at your office, shove them, stick a finger too close to their face while raising your voice: you're fired. Is your boss dumb enough to let it go, or worse, participate? Guess what: when employees sue, you lose, no matter what.
Why should my kids waste a moment's time trying to handle violence and physical intimidation on their own? That's teaching them to handle problems with both hands tied behind their back. I want my kids handling problems smart, and "fighting back" and standing up to bullies on their own terms is playing to lose.
There is all sorts of low-grade kids-stuff nonsense that doesn't need to be escalated. But we're not talking about that here. We're talking about kids who are so persistently targeted and oppressed by this juvenile bullshit that they're considering withdrawing from academic programs.
Fuck that shit. If my son tells me he's quitting band because he's getting pushed around over it, I am going fucking ballistic.
(For whatever it's worth, both my kids spend a good chunk of their discretionary time in martial arts. But they're doing that on its own merits, not as a tool to deal with behavior that would be overtly criminal if it occurred between adults.)
What's the value in teaching children how to respond physically to low-grade physical violence?
Like the modern "zero-tolerance" bullshit, you have equated the physical nature of the violence to a level that just isn't warranted in most cases.
Children use violence more readily than adults because they haven't yet learned more sophisticated methods of intimidation and bullying. Of course you wouldn't confront a co-worker, but you'd ostracise them, spread rumours or make sure the boss knows they fucked up that last project.
The act of responding to the threat directly and in kind teaches the victim several qualities that serve them later in life, namely confidence and the ability to act while afraid to assert themselves. People get bullied all the damn time, if for no other reason than they simply don't confront the bully.
It's not valuable in adult life.
I would suggest that it is. There will come a time where your child will be bullied, physically or not, and you will not be around or able to help them. Their ability to believe in their own self-worth and the notion that regardless of the challenges in front of them; whether they are afraid or whether the outcome is certain to cause them pain; they will not subject themselves to being unfairly treated by their peers. They are who they define themselves to be; as important and valuable than any other person.
While I don't believe that physical violence is necessary to learn this, instilling the "fight back" notion into a child is. From my non-scientific observance, parents that are unwilling to let their child fight are usually the same ones that consistently duck from facing challenges head on. There is something to be said for being afraid and acting anyway that many people just fail to grasp.
To think of the number of teens and adults with all sorts of confidence issues, from depression to addiction to being unable to operate without the approval of others - even if it is against their self interest! I can't help but wonder how many of them have never been taught to respect themselves first.
(a) I'm not a believer in zero tolerance. If you reduce the argument to a zero tolerance scenario, you'll secure my agreement. But we won't have learned anything about the many, many scenarios that aren't zero tolerance situations. It'll be a superficial win.
(b) I recognize that kids use violence because they're too dumb not to. I have an appropriate level of tolerance for that. But that doesn't address my point: this "teach them to fight back" stuff is teaching them to act stupid, to play to lose, on a bully's terms, and to handle conflicts in ways that won't help them in adulthood.
(c) Your "sophisticated" forms of bullying stretch the definition of bullying and transform this into a semantic discussion. Beaurocratic infighting is a valuable adult skill. If there was a class in it I could sign my kids up for, I would.
(d) I probably agree more than disagree on your "self worth" argument. I'm not an advocate for "run and cry" either. But if you're subjected to an unwarranted physical assault as an adult, you're a sucker if your only response is physical self defense. You're also doing the rest of your community a disservice.
(b) Kids are not dumb. They use violence because it's a viable form of intimidation, particularly for males. Adults use violence too. Violence is alive and well in most blue collar male dominated jobs. The act of not being an easy target is specifically addressed by fighting back. You can't project an image of "If you screw with me, I'll make life difficult for you" as an adult if you aren't taught this as a child. This has a huge value every damn day you are not mugged, picked for a car-jacking, or otherwise selected by those people looking for easy targets.
(c) Physical violence is a subset of bullying in pretty much every standard definition. The reason for this is that males tend to solve their issues through force, while females tend to use other methods. If you separate only the male response as something worth addressing, I think you are missing the underlying nature of bullying.
(d) If you punch me, even now as an adult, you're getting your ass kicked; or I'm going to at least hurt you as bad as I can. That being said I don't think I've been punched since I left the army 13 years ago (And before then, probably once or twice in high school). I'd like to think that's because most people - even those inclined to resort to violence - can instinctively tell that would be a bad idea, or at the very least, a difficult task.
As an aside a story:
In 2001, I moved to Vancouver, BC. I was about 26 at the time. As I lived next to the beach, I decided one night to go for a stroll. It must have been about 11-12PM or so. The path by the beach was dark and away from the street down a hill, and at this time of night, almost devoid of people. I liked the water though and being new to the city felt relatively safe. As I was walking, I approached two men (probably late teens early 20's on a bench). One had a bike and one was on foot. As I got closer, they both said nothing to each other. The one on the bike started to ride on the path towards me. At this point I could see they were the stereotypical young b-boy punks. The guy on the bike got closer, slowly. I looked him straight in the eye as he passed and heard him circle around behind me.
I kept on walking, same speed and gait. As I passed the guy on the bench, I looked him straight in the eye as well. You could feel the tension, but I pretended I didn't and just kept walking. The guy on the bike stopped at the bench, now behind me and that was the end of it.
I'm convinced that those two goofs were up to no good. They concluded however, that I wasn't worth their time.
Take it for what it is, but don't ever think for a second that you aren't part of the jungle of primal human behaviour that is very much alive and well.
Re (c): I'm not really interested in the semantic argument. Does bullying exist along a spectrum that also includes office politics? Ok. That doesn't change anything for me. I'm not a pacifist, I'm a pragmatist. It's worth learning how to fight back against office politics.
Re (d): Look, I'm a pretty big guy, and I just don't get fucked with all that often. I also grew up with a brother one year younger than me, so I've exchanged my fair share of punches. I don't think it's good to be afraid of physical violence. Would I like my kids to be able to stare down a bully? ABSOLUTELY.
However, I'm unwilling to confine their responses to playground violence. I don't think anybody should be willing to do that, if only because so many people can't reasonably expected to play this BS game on the bully's own terms, and having your own kids play along makes it that much harder for them.
Fighting back is specifically not playing along. It's imposing your will over yourself in place of the bully's. Not fighting back, telling the teacher, a parent whatever is playing along to the bully.
Humans are pack animals with a social order. By suggesting your child escalate confrontation out of the pack at all times, you have ensured that the bully remains their superior to them when the higher authority is not there.
There WILL come a time in life when your child has no higher authority to appeal to. If they aren't able to establish their own place in whatever pack they are in, it will be established for them, possibly in ways that are not in their own self interests.
A lot of hard-asses delude themselves about how helpless they are against the forms of physical violence they are most likely to confront. It's simple survivorship bias. The people you deal with day to day can't get away with violence. The criminals who can are going to win, or at least put you in a situation with an unacceptable probability of permanent injury.
(I don't think you're a hard-ass, for what it's worth. You're just using one of their arguments!)
Your argument seems to be, "self defense doesn't always work, therefore it's useless."
My argument is, "physical self defense, delegation to authority, situational avoidance, other tactics, and the ability to choose which of these tactics to employ works better than arbitrarily restricting yourself to a single tactic, or arbitrarily ruling out a single tactic."
I wouldn't go toe to toe with a violent criminal if I had any better choice. But the bullies we face as kids in school halls do tend to yield rather easily to a bit of physical force.
> What's the value in teaching children how to respond physically to low-grade physical violence? It's not valuable in adult life.
It's very valuable in playground life, though. The value is that they prevent future low-grade violence by engaging in a bit of low-grade violence themselves.
> I want my kids handling problems smart, and "fighting back" and standing up to bullies on their own terms is playing to lose.
Nonsense. It works really well, in my experience. The playground is not like an office, so your extrapolation to adult behaviour doesn't apply. Teenagers are nearly adult physically, but still unformed mentally and ethically/morally.
> Fuck that shit. If my son tells me he's quitting band because he's getting pushed around over it, I am going fucking ballistic.
How's that going to help him? If he knows that you'll react that way, he likely won't even tell you, and the bullying will continue, in secret.
Here's what I'm going to tell my daughter:
1) No one has the right to attack you. If you are attacked, and you can fight back, do it! If the odds are not in your favour, try to flee to a safe area / allies. Don't worry about suspension / expulsion, etc. I will back you up.
Try to keep the violence proportional, unless it's a do or die situation. I.e. shoving vs. shoving, punching vs. punching, don't use improvised weapons unless they do. OTOH err on the side of survival.
2) If anyone ever threatens serious violence, like rape or death threats, tell me. These are not joking matters. It doesn't mean we'll go ape-shit and over-react, but we need to know it's happening in order to figure out whether it's a real threat.
3) If you're being bullied electronically, then tell us, but never ever react to the bully. Don't feed the troll. If the person can't actually reach out and physically hurt you, don't give them anything to work with.
If you teach your kids to never respond to violence with violence, you're setting them up to be bullied, which will affect them throughout their lives. Authority figures can't always (and often won't) save you. Sometimes you need to fight first and ask questions later.
Proportional violence is a great way to get your kids in the same kind of trouble a bully is bound to get into. It also perpetuates the problem for kids who unavoidably cannot respond in kind to these situations, so that's an outcome I'm happy with.
I'm happy your kids can handle themselves in a physical confrontation. My son's big for his age, and my daughter has really taken to her martial arts classes, so I have high hopes for them too. But if I found out that my kids were responding to low-grade violence by engaging in it themselves, they'd get punished.
(1) Because regardless of whether the standard is fair, in real life, off the playground, violence is as likely as not going to break against my kids as it is to break for them. This "standing up and fighting the bully" mythology is exactly that. The outcomes are simply better if you avoid violence and use the other tools at your disposal.
(2) Because some standards are intrinsically correct, regardless of what the law allows.
Well, I think it's evident that we fundamentally disagree on the action of physical violence. Simply, I believe your views, while commendable are impractical. I know that you perhaps feel mind are barbaric.
> What's the value in teaching children how to respond physically to low-grade physical violence? It's not valuable in adult life. Corner a coworker at your office, shove them, stick a finger too close to their face while raising your voice: you're fired. Is your boss dumb enough to let it go, or worse, participate? Guess what: when employees sue, you lose, no matter what.
Remember, we're talking about a response to aggression. In an office, no one is likely to be shoving you in the first place. If someone is, then you are certainly justified in responding physically if you cannot remove yourself from the situation.
You've seen the internet video where an office-worker rages out, hurting others, and everyone just stands around because they've been conditioned to never use violence? They finally react far too late.
In the altogether likely event that the circumstances that started an office fight are ambiguous, if you respond physically to a low-grade physical assault, you are very possibly going to get fired yourself.
It's possible, I suppose, but I have a hard time imagining such a situation. What do you mean by low-grade physical assault? I'm not talking about an accidental touch or bumping.
IMHO, there is no "low-grade physical" assault in an office environment, because physical interaction of any kind is so frowned upon. What would be low-grade in the playground becomes "are you insane?" in an adult office setting.
How exactly do you want your kids to respond to bullies?
Any solution that relies upon "implicitly trust authority" is even more flawed, because most bullies in the adult world operate under the color of authority, and while you won't get away with punching a pushy cop in the face, you do need the confidence to tell him to kindly get himself a warrant or leave you the hell alone.
Sometimes, even adults in the real world need to physically defend themselves from criminals. This holds doubly true for women.
Most adults in the real world are never going to be able to physically defend themselves from violent criminals. They learned to be doctors and engineers instead of effective violent criminals.
How do I want my kids to respond to bullies? I guess it depends on the situation. But I won't condone my kids throwing punches, and if they have to walk away from somebody at school activities more than once, I want to know about it.
(Whether that attitude means my kids are going to be reluctant to tell me about what's happening at school is my problem to deal with.)
So you denigrate a perfectly good solution that works while offering none of your own.
In adult life, you have the legal right to physically confront burglars and drunken assholes on the street. It takes a degree of tactical judgment and skill to know how and when to confront them, but outright pacifism is wrong for two reasons:
1. It leaves you vitally incapable of handling emergencies. If someone breaks into my house, brandishing a shotgun isn't going to solve the problem completely, but it is going to ensure my immediate safety until the police arrive.
2. All you're doing is delegating the physical violence to someone else, which means "implicitly trust authority". In the school system, the authorities don't care. In real life, the authorities are the bullies more often than not.
Due respect, but in real life you're a moron if you have the option of escaping a fight with drunken assholes on the street, and you choose to engage them directly on their terms.
The rest of your argument is a straw man. Did I make a gun control argument? Did I say you should be incapable of self defense? I did not. Anticipating this exact stupid argument, I made it clear that I (a) appreciated self defense training and (b) have my kids involved in it.
You just don't want them to actually defend themselves, ever.
Responding to a schoolyard bully with a punch to the gut is one and the same as responding to a B&E with a shotgun. If you want your kids to do one but not the other, you're sending mixed messages. You don't respond to barroom bullies with a punch to the gut--you get the bouncer's attention. But that's tactical judgment. If you're in the schoolyard, getting a teacher's attention will just as often do nothing, and if it accomplishes anything it only makes the problem worse. It's more like a prison, where the wardens will allow all kinds of abuses happen without interfering.
"Don't throw a punch, ever" is pacifist crap, not tactical judgment.
I was bullied a lot when I was little, and when my parents complained to the school, it only got worse because the school handled it very publicly.
As much as I hated it, the bullying turned me into a stronger person, and made me more aware of how I came off to others. I'm now very successful in what I do, and it's partly because I focused on excelling in my field, but also because I focused on improving my social skills. Although being a bully is a sign you have a social problem, being the victim made me aware of my own shortcomings, and I worked to correct them.
Getting shoved and pushed around by drunk assholes outside your apartment building every evening when you get home from work would probably also teach you to be a stronger person who could keep a level head under physical threat. But that situation, which parallels your school experience, unquestionably involves repeated criminal assault and battery.
The mere fact that it is possible to draw life lessons from bullying does not mitigate it.
Oh not at all - I didn't mean that it should be left alone. What I mean is that there should be more emphasis on helping the victims grow from and overcome the experience, instead of just trying to prevent it altogether. The author of the article does touch on that, but I think it's generally absent from the minds of most people.
"He's getting bullied at school". "Oh - have you called the school?"
I'm not saying people should be complacent, I'm just saying that helping the victims is probably more important than other solutions. In my case, I always reacted the wrong way to bullying. I think that if I hadn't reacted the way I did, bullying would've stopped.
Why should we teach people how to expend effort to overcome problems they shouldn't be confronted with in the first place? If somebody assaults you, you should press charges.
One would hope that most people understand that life is slightly more complex than that.
Negative situations are a part of life. They make us who we are. Even if we could eliminate bullying entirely, we would also eliminate all of the valuable lessons that a child learns from the experience. This is not to suggest I support bullying at all; you don't learn how to ride a bike without falling, and you don't learn confidence and action without being challenged.
Because the police aren't everywhere and we don't want them to be and there are situations in which it would be valuable to have the confidence to physically defend yourself.
Confidence is good. Ability to physically defend yourself is good. Assault and battery is bad. Also: a crime. Your response to crime shouldn't simply be to mitigate its impact on yourself.
Someone breaks into your house. You're armed. You prevent them from stealing anything. Having mitigated the crime, do you then let the situation drop? Of course not.
Same situation. The homeowner isn't armed. Should they have been? Probably not. If you aren't extremely comfortable with firearms, you shouldn't own them.
But bullying is nowhere nearly as bad as burglary! That's probably true. But the logic is the same. At some point, the situation has escalated to a point where rugged individualism is no longer the answer.
Are there a lot of low-grade situations, particularly on a playground, where escalation to the school board isn't warranted? OF COURSE. That's why we use the term "escalation": there's a spectrum of responses. But in my case, none of those responses involves encouraging physical violence, or tolerating violence of any level directed towards my children.
Ok, I finally see what you're saying. What if your son doesn't tell you?
To press charges, you need to know what's happened, and who's responsible. You may never get this info. I know of people who were viciously bullied, but put on a brave face and never let on to their parents. This kind of situation can go on for years, by which time the lasting damage is done.
I have pretty awful memories of bullying, fights, etc. from growing up and the tyranny of the schoolyard pack. I had visions of those scenarios when my own kids started public school but I’ve been very impressed with how the school has made creating a good environment a top priority. A couple of things that really impressed me:
1. At the first meeting the principal said that he wanted to know if a kid was having trouble fitting in, making friends. Creating a good environment where kids enjoyed coming to school was obviously a priority at the top of the organization.
2. In addition to all of the classic recess games like kickball and four square, the school put out some chess sets and got toys for the sandbox so that kids had alternatives. There was a playground rule, “can’t say can’t play” that instilled the notion that games were open to everyone.
3. Counselors entered the classrooms early to talk about things like conflict resolution at a level that the kids could understand.
This approach seems light years ahead of what I remember as a kid. In short, I agree that schools can be very effective at eliminating bullying if it is a priority.
My son could have been the subject of the article. In 4th grade, he was constantly harassed by a single bully on the bus and in class. Unsurprisingly, all the cliches held: the bully had been in fights with most of the boys on the bus; the school was completely unresponsive to requests for intervention; and the parents of the bully didn't care.
For the first time, I forced my son into an activity - martial arts. After a few months, it gave my son the confidence to stand his ground against his tormentor and fight back. Again, unsurprisingly, my son served his first, and the bully his fifth, suspension for violating the "zero tolerance" for throwing fists in school. It was a great life lesson about fairness. He has not had a problem since.
Most kids, esp boys, will be bullied at some time, but I shuddered at the thought of my son being the constant target every year.
I experienced a strong case of PTSD and low self-esteem as the result of an extended period of quite pernicious and malicious bullying. In my case, the principal bully -- the leader of a pack who all engaged in the bullying -- was the son of a higher level school official; some of the school staff saw it occurring but took no action, I speculate out of fear of retribution.
For my part, I was also confused and frustrated by the situation. I had no desire to fight the fellow, and I didn't understand where this aggression was coming from. I also literally didn't know how to fight. No one ever taught me even the basics.
The psychological impact was strong enough that I will live with it, to some extent, for the rest of my life.
My recommendations to a parent or mentor would include:
+ Ensure the child is trained in self-defense. I will not allow any child of mine to be without such training. The purpose is not to become aggressive and controlling of others. It is to learn to remain centered and in control of oneself, and hopefully in control of the situation. At least in control of one's reaction to it.
+ Understand that, per my limited reading, bullying is an effective social strategy. Perhaps that may change as society evolves, but it has and does serve the purpose of promoting the bully and gaining them certain rewards. Not that the bullying is necessarily a conscious, pre-meditated decision with such rewards as the known and expected outcome. However, it is not a purely pathological social aberration. As such, it is something that will appear and that will need to be addressed. Saying it is "wrong" and "unfair" does not help the victim in dealing with the situation. Creating a social structure that aids the victim while mediating the bullying does. However (again), the individual cannot count on others always fostering such a social structure. The individual needs to be able to take care of themself. From that standpoint, they may then also be in a position to help foster a social environment that mediates against bullying.
+ Modern society seems to me to have created a bit of a "Lord of the Flies" situation. Many parents' daily lives are so separated from those of their children. Kids spend 8, 10 hours away from their parents in social environments that are strongly weighted towards their peer group, with limited participation by teachers, coaches and such as supervising adults. An entire subculture develops largely independent of broader society. Kids can end up very vulnerable within this. And the culture's message and influence is often to not communicate problems to adults. This reinforces the isolation of the victim.
Sounds like this guy was full out abusing you rather than just "bullying" you? I got occasionally pushed around in school and dished it out myself, but it was hardly bad enough to cause shell shock and extreme psychological trauma years later.
Don't dismiss him so lightly. There's a huge difference between infrequent bullying and sustained bullying. As you say, sustained bullying is abuse (in its modern sense), though we often use the words interchangeably.
Imagine that you're in a situation where you're thrown together with people who if they even see you will try to do something nasty to you. Now imagine that happening every day, for years.
You're making the same observation the article is. Parents are by necessity separated from their parents for 8 hours a day. Ergo, it falls upon the school administration to decisively handle this problem, to an extent that is just now beginning to be recognized by academia, medicine, and school boards.
+1 for alerting me to a possible misinterpretation of my comment.
I was curious why there wasn't a real description of the solution to the bullying problem in the article, so I followed the trail back to the originator. Turns out he's a bit entrepreneurial in using the model of business to bring his solution to the masses, and probably (I hope) allow him to better refine the solution as he goes. I'm trying to do the exact same thing.
What struck me is that it seems plausible to me --and I'm fantasizing here-- that this story was suggested/planted/encouraged by his company as a PR move. This is what we should all be doing, and if he did it then he did it very well.
