I have been reading a number of articles written by school leaders, psychologist, parenting advisers, that talk about methods of reducing the amount of bullying that is going on in our society. What has really surprised me is the number of comments that are then received talking about how the kids need to be given permission and encouraged to stand up to the bully including to the point of physically beating them up.
The discussion is interesting. It is such a shame in two ways. First to try to solve our bullying issues in school without involving everyone in the community and especially parents will never work. We cannot just send our kids off to someone else and expect them to fix them. Second to solve bullying with bullying does not suggest anything to the bully except that whoever the bigger bully is WINS! Not a good example.
Teaching and experiencing empathy, kindness, and helping our kids mature in our world will have a bigger impact on them then just bullying them back. Now it is up to all of us to take responsibility where we can and step up to setting a good example in all of our dealing with each other and especially our children.
I have just completed studying a course that was originally set up to teach police officers how to deal with all of the tough situations that they have to deal with – without getting into a physical altercations, and to know when it is the time to act in a physical manner. The course has now been redesigned to be taught to our students. I am looking forward to sharing this with our community in the weeks and months to come, because I believe there is a time when action needs to be taken, but there is so much that we can do beforehand that we are not teaching our kids to do that could prevent the physical altercation.
Tags: bully, bully prevention, life skills, verbal judo, verbal self defense
