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Taming Bullying

Every school year, students who are bullied have excessive absences and, often, eventually, leave public school looking for refuge in charter schools, online and home school programs. If your child or a child you know has aggressive and bullying tendencies, know that counseling can help. It can also help to understand the aggressive and predatory behavior of bullying. It helps you to identify the problem and explain the behavior to school staff. And, your child’s understanding of bullying can be a powerful armor against personalizing the bullying behavior and becoming a disempowered victim.

What is bullying behavior?

Bullying and harsh teasing are different. Friends and siblings tease each other. It can be part of their bonding. As children, junior youth and even adolescents are still developing, sometimes teasing can be harsh and inappropriate. What sets teasing apart from bullyinimageg is intent and the outcome. When friends or siblings tease the intent is to connect through humor, and they feel sincere remorse when someone gets hurt. When a peer bullies the intent is to harm, and the peer feels triumphant when the victim is hurt.

Why Do Kids Bully?

Bullying behavior is about force and domination. Also, the aggressor has a negative view of anyone with differences from h/her group. It can be anyone different in height, weight, or those who wear glasses. It can be anyone who has a different skin color, or different hair, curly or straight. It can be someone who is quiet or who is loud and boisterous. It can be someone who plays an instrument or someone who is an athlete. The more differences, the more there is to attack.

Research and experience show there are many reasons a child begins to bully. The most prominent reasons include lack of positive attention from those who are important to the child and the child’s own undeveloped sense of empathy. These children feel disempowered in their primary relationships with caregivers and/or disempowered over their circumstance. They are seeking power. They feel rejected and dismissed. They are looking for acceptance from peers they perceive as having power. This change can happen to a child who is being neglected or abused and to a child living with cancer or a child whose parent has died. The child feels no power over h/her circumstances. They feel abandoned and alone.

Nurturing and Attentive Parenting is the Remedy

To help your child, take an honest inventory of your relationship with h/her. If you come home from work and order your child to do homework, shower and go to bed, consider that you’re your child needs your loving attention more than anything. Communication with your child is key. Acknowledge the problem and talk it through. Talk to seek understanding of what is missing for h/her that might have led to bullying. Help your child see the empowering effects of doing good deeds. You can read books and articles about positive people who are honored as heroes. You can notice when your child does a good deed and celebrate it. Because aggressive and predatory behavior is about low empathy, you can work with your child on building their empathy for others.

What to Do?

It is necessary to set reasonable consequences for misbehavior. School age children can be included in setting up consequences, once they learn how their behavior hurt another person. Consequences should be related to their aggressive behavior, like doing an act of service for a neighbor or elder or grooming, feeding, and walking the dog. These consequences restore the loss of caring about others and help to develop empathy. Often additional help is needed when a child has low empathy and aggressive behavior toward others. Professional counseling can help you help your child. Counseling can also give your child a neutral person to express h/her feelings to and a trained person who can help the child strengthen empathy and prosocial skills.

Children Who Do Not Bully

The child who does not bully is one who is mentally alert, intuitive, i.e., able to apply past experience and cumulative knowledge without laboring thought, and who acts with compassion for others and a sense of service to the greater good. The lingering early man tendency to view differences as potential threat is part of the survival instinct. With millions of years of development, humankind has the capacity, now, to view peer differences as interesting and potentially an asset, even, potentially, as a friend or mate. A child growing up in a neighborhood, society, or in world conditions that do not model these qualities needs a parent or caregiver who is mindful of their child’s development and ready to intervene. They need a parent who will intentionally teach these qualities and stop the development of bullying behavior.

 

Don’t let your child’s behavior negatively affect their lives or of the lives of those around them. Trust the expert therapists at Fairbanks Psychiatric & Neurological Clinic APC  to find the right solution for your child’s behavior. They can also provide treatment plans for those suffering from mood disorders, PTSD, or in need of general counseling. Sally Caldwell, LPC-S, is now accepting Tricare and VA as insurance. Visit their website for information on neurological and mental health , or call for an appointment at (907) 452-1739.

Special thanks to Sally Caldwell, LPC-S, for writing this article.

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