Q: I treat both kids who are bullied and kids who bully in my practice. Recently a father asked me, “Why has bullying gotten so bad?”
A: Bullying has always existed, but it does seem to be on the rise. The consequences of unchecked bullying are poignantly portrayed in the new movie “Bully”. I had the opportunity to attend a pre-screening of the movie. You cannot walk away from this film without feeling that something has to be done to reduce bullying in our schools and online.
I think that bullying is on the rise due to a lack of accountability. As a culture, we do not hold each other accountable for bad behavior anymore. In fact, we celebrate it with reality TV and online. Households are more self-contained than they were in the past. In the past, even though mom or dad may be busy, a child was aware that the neighbor, the pastor, or a friend’s parent was watching. If he or she misbehaved, mom and dad would hear about it. I believe that this is one reason why bullying has increased. But, it’s not the only reason.
Along with holding our kids accountable as a community, I think that we also have to address both sides of the issue. When parents and school officials are aware of bullying, they usually punish the bully and encourage the child being bullied to walk away. The problem with this is that it does not address the feelings that are beneath the behavior. If we don’t talk with both the bullied and the bully to understand what they are feeling, then we can’t truly address the problem.
Schools are currently singularly obsessed with “closing the gap”. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that this is an honorable and important value for schools to have. But, the singular focus and lack of funding and personnel makes it difficult for schools to give bullying the full attention that it requires. I sympathize with the struggle school officials have to meet their goals, but I also believe that they are falling short of the expectation that parents have of them to keep our kids safe.
According to CASEL, “School staff and parents are often unaware of how serious bullying can be in schools until a dramatic incident captures wide attention.” CASEL has done research on ways to reduce bullying in school. CASEL reports that, “research suggests that a systemic approach is necessary to effectively address bullying and associated behaviors. Social and emotional learning (SEL) programming can be an effective way to reduce the likelihood of bullying because it promotes skills, behaviors, attitudes, and environmental factors that are incompatible with bullying and other forms of negative peer interactions.” But, what can parents do at home?
In his ground breaking live talk, “Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child”, Dr. John Gottman addresses bullying head on and in his book by the same title, he teaches parents the importance of Emotion Coaching our children. In doing so, we give them the tools to communicate with each other and adults about their feelings.
Adults have stressful lives and it can be easy to trivialize the worlds of our children by saying, “oh, that’s just kids being kids.” It’s easy to think, “It’s not my kids. It’s not our school, our town, our problem…” The truth is, bullying happens everywhere and we can begin to do something about it by communicating with our kids about their lives and their feelings. We can encourage empathy in them by showing them some empathy. We can demand that our schools develop and implement plans to discipline and treat bullying as well as demanding that they include a social-emotional learning curriculum to ensure that not only are our kids learning how to be better kinder citizens, students, and friends at home, they’re learning it at school too.
Here is an archive of Katie’s previous Macaroni Kid Columns
