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Moms Talk Q&A: How Do You Deal With Bullies?

From the perspective of a parent, identifying bullying behavior can be tough. But once you do, then what?

Welcome to Moms Talk, where our takes your questions, gives advice and shares solutions. We invite you and your circle of friends to help build a community of support for mothers and their families right here in Maplewood-Brentwood.

So, grab a cup of coffee and settle in as we start the conversation today with the question: How do you deal with bullies? The Moms Council offers responses below, and we encourage you to jump in with your experiences, too.

Dealing with bullying is tough — really tough.  My natural response with my kids is to go into hyper-protective-mom-mode with sonic speed. But my natural response may not help the situation and may in fact exacerbate it. So I have to navigate between my emotional self and my intellectual self.

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Let me just say that I believe that bullying must be addressed 100 percent of the time. To ignore bullying is to let the wounds caused by bullying to fester and to let the problems that provoked the bullying behavior to fester as well. The response to bullying has to be on several levels.

Caring for the victim is the most immediate need—finding out what happened, acknowledging the hurt and reassuring her. Calling in the bully’s family, the bully and possibly the school officials for a fact-finding meeting is essential. Keeping to the facts in describing what happened is a goal. Devise an agreement for what is to be expected in the future.

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For example: Name-calling will not be tolerated and engaging in name-calling will result in specific consequences.  I think it’s important that the adults agree how to communicate in the future is important to. Bullying—like any other behavior—does not change overnight, unfortunately.

Being bullied is a hard subject to deal with as a parent and as a child. As a child, I was teased horribly. I was called fat, "Annie" (as in the movie, I did have tight curly red hair), snobby and ugly. It was such a sad time for me. I would cry every day to my parents.

They did the best that they could at the time by contacting the teacher and the principal, but it is really hard to regulate what a child does outside an adult’s earshot. Unfortunately, I seemed to be on the receiving end of all jokes in elementary school, or, at least, it felt that way.

In the end, we moved. I feel the long term damage was already done. Still today, I am very sensitive, afraid that what is being said is always about me. When I am around a new group of people, I rarely speak, afraid what I might say may sound unintelligent.  It takes time for me to open up. 

As the parent now, with these memories, I try to teach my children to have good communication and respect with others, and hope maybe we will not have to visit the subject of bullying.  

In case we do, I will do my best to handle it. I will ask my children what they think should be done. If they shrug it off, I know I should wait and not intervene. But if it looks like it's too much for them to handle, the phone calls start.

I would start by calling the teacher, counselor and principal. If I can’t get any results, I would call that child’s parents directly. The answer could be something simple at their home they may need to change. I will always be involved with my children and their activities. That way, I feel I at least have a foot in the door if something should come up.

Being bullied is heartbreaking, regardless of whether it’s your own child or someone else’s. When a child is being bullied physically or verbally, the only thing you can do is intercede and help your child use coping mechanisms to get past the hurt and understand that bullying is never OK.

If I see that my child is down, unusually quiet or feeling left out, my first reaction is to simply get him to talk about what is happening. Why is he sad? How is he feeling? There’s never an easy answer to why someone is being mean to someone else, but listening is always a good start. 

We’ve personally been very lucky to attend an elementary school that has made a priority of character education. Since my child was in kindergarten, there has been a strong focus on respecting one another and building relationships with students throughout the school at all age levels.

I’m not naive enough to think bullying doesn’t happen. But an environment where children are encouraged to talk about how they feel when they are struggling with someone else has made a difference from when I was young and in school. As a parent, I also feel encouraged to talk about what I might see happening to my own child or another child with a teacher, counselor and/or the principal.

I’ve personally tried to maintain an open relationship with my own child, to talk about what’s happening to him and to his friends. We often talk about being unkind and why friends would treat one another disrespectfully. Although it’s difficult for a child to understand and not take things personally, we always talk about what underlying things may cause someone to act the way they do. It can be as simple as they were having a bad day or much deeper concerns such as trouble at home.

It’s never easy being a kid, and with so many influences from television to the Internet and beyond, we have to just be there for our children and hope we can help them through the pain that unfortunately comes with growing up.

There are a lot of great resources to learn more about bullying and what you can do to help your child and those around you. One of my favorites is the Stop Bullying site from the Department of Health and Human Services. Your local school should also have many resources as well.

Girls and boys bully in different ways.  Girls usually bully each other through social manipulation and isolation.  Even at their very young ages, my girls have experienced bullying.

My preschooler is a very gentle soul.  She attends preschool only two days a week, which sometimes makes her feel like she's missing out on the action at school on the other three days. She has come home to me just very quiet and sad some days, telling me that a little girl in her class does not let her play with her best friend. 

The next time I dropped her off in preschool, I hung around to watch, and witnessed exactly what my child spoke of—there is one little girl in her class who physically gets between my daughter and her friend, and won't let my daughter complete a conversation with her friends, or won't let my daughter join into some private game.

I don’t know why that cute little girl has targeted my daughter. If I hadn't specifically looked for that behavior, it would have been impossible to discern the subtle manipulation happening in a room full of playing children. How to handle it?

Well, most days my girl is happy when she comes home, and I love her preschool teachers, so I do believe she is having a good experience over all in school.  That, along with the fact that psychological warfare is common among school girls (and women) has made me hesitate to step in and say something about it to her teachers.

I fear engaging in "helicopter parenting" will not help teach my daughter how to handle mean girls. I try help my daughter by explaining to her that there is nothing wrong with her. The bully little girl is the one with the problem.

Maybe I should mention it to her teachers, and the little bully might learn better ways to interact with her classmates before that behavior is set in stone and she grows up into a big-girl bully. However, a lot of behavioral patterns are reinforced at home, so I'm not sure a teacher can fix that.

Boy bullies and girl bullies are definitely different. My younger son had problems with a bully on the school bus when he was in kindergarten. It was classic bully maneuvers and techniques. There was pushing and shoving and threats of great bodily harm. I wish I could say that we all sat down like mature individuals and became better people, but that isn’t exactly how it happened.

Unfortunately, all this happened when I was also lecturing the boys on resolving their own conflicts and not run to us with every little disagreement. We were tired of refereeing every conflict over the TV remote or whose turn it was to pick the movie we watched.

So my 5-year-old took matters into his own hands and gave the bully exactly what the bully was threatening to give him—a bloody nose.  The result was an embarrassing trip to the office to discuss with the principal and the mandatory bus suspension.

Why he picked that day and time to listen to something I said, we’ll never know.  However, the bully stopped.  Whether it was the bloody nose or the lecture from the principal, I’m not sure. But a lesson was learned.

It was a different story when my daughter started kindergarten this year. There is a little girl on her bus who torments all the children regularly. She isn’t physically abusive. Her tactics are much more subtle. A mean word, teasing, trying to isolate her victims from their friends—it’s more psychological warfare than a physical onslaught. 

When this first happened, we encouraged our daughter to tell the bus driver, as we want her to learn to solve her own problems. That didn’t help, so I called the principal and all the kids were given assigned seats on the bus. Although I feel like this is punishing all the kids for the actions of one, it has helped, but only because there is less exposure to the bullying child. She still torments the kids at recess and when they walk up and down the bus aisle. 

The problem isn’t solved, and it remains hard to prove and hard to define. Just because the “mean girl” has bullied in the past, does that mean every time she casts a glare your way, she's back at it? Or is she just a sad and sour little girl? And did she really glare, or is my little girl just having an extra sensitive day?  Sometimes it’s an easy call; sometimes it’s not.

I try to keep in mind that my job as a parent is to support my children so they have the self-confidence needed to stand up for themselves, and remind myself to have the self-control needed to not try and fix everything myself. I want them to learn conflict resolution does not mean bloody noses, but I also want them to learn that you have to confront adversity and rise above it.


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