All About Bullies

Please note that if your child display some of these points it does not mean he is a bully or is being bullied to a medical certainty. These are just general observations. Every case is unique. Please seek the help of a trained mental health professional if you have any concerns.

What is Bullying?

Bullying is repeated verbal, physical, social or psychological aggressive behaviour by a person or group directed towards a less powerful person or group that is intended to cause harm, distress or fear.

Source: education.vic.gov.au

7 Ways to spot if my child is a bully

1. Your Child Has Trouble Sleeping

A recent study of 341 children conducted by the University of Michigan found that children with sleep problems related to sleep- disordered breathing were more likely to display bullying tendencies or have other conduct problems than children without the sleep concerns. If your child is having sleep problems, a visit with your doctor or a sleep specialist might be a good place to start preventing bullying or to correct bully behavior.

2. Your Child Has Behavioral Issues

Being hot-headed, impulsive, or easily frustrated are three common behaviors that could indicate that a child is a bully, according to D. Janell Dietz, EdD, an author on the subject of bullying and a former school counselor and teacher. “Kids who are bullying generally become easily frustrated if they don’t get their way, lack empathy for others, and have a history of discipline problems,” she says. Look for these underlying signs of bullying in your child’s everyday, at-home manner.

3. Your Child Is Getting Into Trouble at School

If your child starts having issues once he or she goes back to school, this is a telltale sign that something is not quite right with your child’s behavior, and bullying might be part of the problem. “If your child is getting into trouble at school for Pghting, or acts dominant or aggressive with other kids, you may have a bully on your hands,” warns Dr. Dietz.

4. Your Child Is Obsessed With Popularity

Another warning sign of bullying is a child who is Pxated on being popular — perhaps to the point of obsession. This behavior underlies a lot of insecurities, says Newman. “They will often speak about being popular and how cool or great it is,” she says. The bullying may involve excluding children from groups or acting in a hostile way toward any child or group of children that is somehow different from them.

5. Your Child’s Friends Show Aggressive Tendencies

It may be diUcult to pick up on some of these signs of bullying with your own child, but if his or her friends seem aggressive or mean-spirited, or if they exhibit some of the other signs of bullying, then your child might be involved in bullying as well. “Children who bully are more likely to have friends who bully and engage in violent behaviors,” notes Dietz.

6. There Is Violence at Home

According to a recent study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, bullies or victims of bullying were much more likely to have experienced violence in the home. “Bullies were about four times more likely to have been hurt by someone in their family than were students who were neither bullies nor victims of bullying,” says Dietz.

7. You Don’t Have a Good Relationship With Your Child

Regardless of which signs of bullying your child is exhibiting, Dietz says that the issues often come back to parenting. Bad parenting can lead to bullying and, in the long run, good parenting can solve many of these problems. “Parents play a key role in whether their child becomes a bully,” says Dietz. “Children are more likely to bully others if they feel their parents are frequently angry at them or if they feel that they are a nuisance to their parents. Parents who have a good relationship and talk openly with their kids raise kids who are less likely to bully others.”

Source: everydayhealth.com

Rude vs Mean vs Bullying

1. Rude = Inadvertently saying or doing something that hurts someone else

From kids, rudeness might look more like burping in someone’s face, jumping ahead in line, bragging about achieving the highest grade or even throwing a crushed up pile of leaves in someone’s face. On their own, any of these behaviors could appear as elements of bullying, but when looked at in context, incidents of rudeness are usually spontaneous, unplanned inconsideration, based on thoughtlessness, poor manners or narcissism, but not meant to actually hurt someone.

2. Mean = Purposefully saying or doing something to hurt someone once (or maybe twice)

Mean = Purposefully saying or doing something to hurt someone once (or maybe twice). The main distinction between “rude” and “mean” behavior has to do with intention; while rudeness is often unintentional, mean behavior very much aims to hurt or depreciate someone. Kids are mean to each other when they criticize clothing, appearance, intelligence, coolness or just about anything else they can Pnd to denigrate. Meanness also sounds like words spoken in anger — impulsive cruelty that is often regretted in short order. Very often, mean behavior in kids is motivated by angry feelings and/or the misguided goal of propping themselves up in comparison to the person they are putting down. Commonly, meanness in kids sounds an awful lot like:
• “Are you seriously wearing that sweater again? Didn’t you just wear it, like, last week? Get a life.” • “You are so fat/ugly/stupid/gay.” • “I hate you!”
Make no mistake; mean behaviors can wound deeply and adults can make a huge difference in the lives of young people when they hold kids accountable for being mean. Yet, meanness is different from bullying in important ways that should be understood and differentiated when it comes to intervention

3. Bullying = Intentionally aggressive behavior, repeated over time, that involves an imbalance of power

Experts agree that bullying entails three key elements: an intent to harm, a power imbalance and repeated acts or threats of aggressive behavior. Kids who bully say or do something intentionally hurtful to others and they keep doing it, with no sense of regret or remorse — even when targets of bullying show or express their hurt or tell the aggressors to stop.

Bullying may be physical, verbal, relational or carried out via technology:

• Physical aggression was once the gold standard of bullying— the “sticks and stones” that made adults in charge stand up and take notice. This kind of bullying includes hitting, punching, kicking, spitting, tripping, hair pulling, slamming a child into a locker and a range of other behaviors that involve physical aggression.

• Verbal aggression is what our parents used to advise us to “just ignore.” We now know that despite the old adage, words and threats can, indeed, hurt and can even cause profound, lasting harm.

• Relational aggression is a form of bullying in which kids use their friendship—or the threat of taking their friendship away—to hurt someone. Social exclusion, shunning, hazing, and rumor spreading are all forms of this pervasive type of bullying that can be especially beguiling and crushing to kids.

It is important to distinguish between rude, mean and bullying so that teachers, school administrators, police, youth workers, parents and kids all know what to pay attention to and when to intervene. As we have heard too often in the news, a child’s future may depend on a non-jaded adult’s ability to discern between rudeness at the bus stop and life-altering bullying.

4. Your Child Is Obsessed With Popularity

Another warning sign of bullying is a child who is Pxated on being popular — perhaps to the point of obsession. This behavior underlies a lot of insecurities, says Newman. “They will often speak about being popular and how cool or great it is,” she says. The bullying may involve excluding children from groups or acting in a hostile way toward any child or group of children that is somehow different from them.

5. Your Child’s Friends Show Aggressive Tendencies

It may be diUcult to pick up on some of these signs of bullying with your own child, but if his or her friends seem aggressive or mean-spirited, or if they exhibit some of the other signs of bullying, then your child might be involved in bullying as well. “Children who bully are more likely to have friends who bully and engage in violent behaviors,” notes Dietz.

6. There Is Violence at Home

According to a recent study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, bullies or victims of bullying were much more likely to have experienced violence in the home. “Bullies were about four times more likely to have been hurt by someone in their family than were students who were neither bullies nor victims of bullying,” says Dietz.

7. You Don’t Have a Good Relationship With Your Child

Regardless of which signs of bullying your child is exhibiting, Dietz says that the issues often come back to parenting. Bad parenting can lead to bullying and, in the long run, good parenting can solve many of these problems. “Parents play a key role in whether their child becomes a bully,” says Dietz. “Children are more likely to bully others if they feel their parents are frequently angry at them or if they feel that they are a nuisance to their parents. Parents who have a good relationship and talk openly with their kids raise kids who are less likely to bully others.”

Source: everydayhealth.com

What is not bullying

The incidents on this list are NOT considered bullying:

1. Not liking someone

It is very natural that people do not like everyone around them and, as unpleasant as it may be to know someone does not like you, verbal and non-verbal messages of “I don’t like you” are not acts of bullying.

2. Being excluded

Again, it is very natural for people to gather around a group of friends and we cannot be friends with everyone, so it is acceptable that when kids have a party or play a game at the playground, they will include their friends and exclude others. It is very important to remind kids they do the same thing sometimes too and, although exclusion is unpleasant, it is not an act of bullying.

3. Accidentally bumping into someone

When people bump into others, the reaction depends mostly on the bumped person’s mood. If they have had a bad day, they think it was an act of aggressive behavior, but if they are in the good mood, they smile back and attract an apology. This is also relevant for playing sport, like when kids throwing the ball at each other hit someone on the head. It is very important for teachers and parents to explain that some accidents happen without any bad intention and it is important not to create a big conhict, because it was NOT an act of bullying.

4. Making other kids play things a certain way

Again, this is very natural behavior. Wanting things to be done our way is normal and is not an act of bullying. To make sure kids do not fall into considering it as an aggressive or “bossy” behavior, we need to teach them assertiveness. If your kids come home and complain that Jane is very bossy and she always wants things to be done her way, you can show them that they want it too and that Jane is miserable, because she is not hexible enough and she will suffer in life for insisting that things be done her way. Again, although it is not fun or pleasant, this is NOT bullying.

5. A single act of telling a joke about someone

Making fun of other people is not fun for them, but the difference between having a sense of humor and making fun of someone is very Pne. It is important to teach kids (and grownups) that things they say as jokes should also be amusing for the others. If not, they should stop. Unless it happens over and over again and done deliberately to hurt someone, telling jokes about people is NOT bullying.

6. Arguments

Arguments are just heated disagreements between two (or more) people (or groups). It is natural that people have different interests and disagree on many things. Think about it, most of us have disagreements with ourselves, so it is very understandable to have disagreements with others. The argument itself is NOT a form of bullying, although some people turn arguments into bullying, because they want to win the argument so much. They use every means to get what they want and Pnd a weakness in the other person, abuse knowledge or trust they have gained and use it against the other person. It is very important to distinguish between natural disagreements and bullying during an argument.

7. Expression of unpleasant thoughts or feelings regarding others

Again, communication requires at least two players. Although it may be unpleasant to hear what someone thinks about you, it is NOT a form of bullying but a very natural thing. In every communication, there are disagreements and some form of judgment about each other’s attitude and behavior. If someone says to you, “I think this was not a nice gesture” or “You insulted me when you said this”, this is NOT bullying but an expression of thoughts and feelings.

8. Isolated acts of harassment, aggressive behavior, intimidation or meanness

The dePnition of bullying states that there is repetition in the behavior. Bullying is a conscious, repeated, hostile, aggressive behavior of an individual or a group abusing their position with the intention to harm others or gain real or perceived power. Therefore, anything that happens once is NOT an act of bullying. As a parent, it is important that you pay attention to what your kids are telling you and Pnd out if things are happening more than once.

All the behaviors above are unpleasant and need to be addressed, but they are not to be treated as bullying. Many times, labeling a single act of aggression can turn it into bullying just by perceiving it that way.

Source: ronitbaras.com

4 Ways Parents Make Bullying Worse

Bullying. It’s a scary word that invokes strong emotions in many parents. What would you do if you found out that your child was being bullied? Before you answer, check out these common mistakes parents make when it comes to bullying in their teen’s life.

1. Resort to child’s play

While it is very tempting to want to defend your child, engaging in childish behavior is one of the worst things a parent can do when their child is bullied. Do NOT gossip or spread rumors about the bully or their family, post mean comments online, call the family to berate them, or try to turn other people in the community against them. It is important to model socially civilized and appropriate behaviors to help your child overcome this diUculty. You are not teaching your child to be strong by acting rude to people who hurt them.

2. Focus on the wrong things

Again, it is very natural for people to gather around a group of friends and we cannot be friends with everyone, so it is acceptable that when kids have a party or play a game at the playground, they will include their friends and exclude others. It is very important to remind kids they do the same thing sometimes too and, although exclusion is unpleasant, it is not an act of bullying.Sometimes parents get so mad that they want justice or revenge. They lose sight of what their ultimate goal is: helping their child move beyond the bullying incident. Research shows that the most helpful actions for bullied victims are support, affection, and friendship. Help your child cope and feel stronger by encouraging friendships and fun activities with the family. Focus your energy on what is happening with your child, not on what is happening in the bully’s life.

As parents, the main focus should not be on the punishment the bully receives, but determining whether or not the bullying has stopped and whether or not your child is safe. If the bullying is continuing, then you do need to follow up with the appropriate authorities, but if the bullying has stopped, you need to let it go. If the bullying occurred in school, recognize that federal law prevents schools from telling you anything about another child, including the punishment of your child’s bully.

3. Overreact

Parents automatically feel hurt when their child is hurt. Although it is natural to get emotional and/or angry, acting on those emotions will only result in mistakes. Many parents jump to their teen’s defense without Pnding out all the facts. Some parents immediately call the school, the teacher, the coach or the principal without giving their child a chance to navigate the situation. Parents should Prst collect information about what is occurring and then talk through possible solutions with their teen. It is quite possible that when you discover the facts, your child is actually just dealing with normal conhict. There is a difference between unkind behavior and bullying. For something to constitute bullying, there must be 3 elements present: a power imbalance, an intent to harm your child, and repeated incidents. Until all the facts are in, don’t simply assume your child is blameless either. It is normal for children to fudge the truth with their parents to avoid getting into trouble. If you do determine that it is bullying, take a deep breath and put together a logical plan of action.

4. Ignore the bullying

On the other extreme from overreacting, is doing nothing. How many times have you heard someone say, “oh, just ignore them and they’ll stop”? While that advice sometimes works in minor childhood teasing, it generally does not work in cases of bullying. Some parents mistakenly think:

– If they ignore a situation, it will go away.
– This is just “kids being kids” or everyone gets bullied sometime in life.
– This is just a disagreement and their child should work this out on their own.