How to discuss bullying with your child

How to Prevent Bullying | StopBullying.gov

Parents, school staff, and other caring adults have a role to play in preventing bullying. They can:

Help kids understand bullying. Talk about what bullying is and how to stand up to it safely. Tell kids bullying is unacceptable. Make sure kids know how to get help.
Keep the lines of communication open. Check in with kids often. Listen to them. Know their friends, ask about school, and understand their concerns.
Encourage kids to do what they love. Special activities, interests, and hobbies can boost confidence, help kids make friends, and protect them from bullying behavior.
Model how to treat others with kindness and respect.

Help Kids Understand Bullying

Kids who know what bullying is can better identify it. They can talk about bullying if it happens to them or others. Kids need to know ways to safely stand up to bullying and how to get help.

Encourage kids to speak to a trusted adult if they are bullied or see others being bullied. The adult can give comfort, support, and advice, even if they can’t solve the problem directly. Encourage the child to report bullying if it happens.
Talk about how to stand up to kids who bully. Give tips, like using humor and saying “stop” directly and confidently. Talk about what to do if those actions don’t work, like walking away
Talk about strategies for staying safe, such as staying near adults or groups of other kids.
Urge them to help kids who are bullied by showing kindness or getting help.
Watch the short webisodes and discuss them - PDF with kids.

Keep the Lines of Communication Open

Research tells us that children really do look to parents and caregivers for advice and help on tough decisions. Sometimes spending 15 minutes a day talking can reassure kids that they can talk to their parents if they have a problem. Start conversations about daily life and feelings with questions like these:

What was one good thing that happened today? Any bad things?
What is lunch time like at your school? Who do you sit with? What do you talk about?
What is it like to ride the school bus?
What are you good at? What would do you like best about yourself?

Talking about bullying directly is an important step in understanding how the issue might be affecting kids. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but it is important to encourage kids to answer them honestly. Assure kids that they are not alone in addressing any problems that arise. Start conversations about bullying with questions like these:

What does “bullying” mean to you?
Describe what kids who bully are like. Why do you think people bully?
Who are the adults you trust most when it comes to things like bullying?
Have you ever felt scared to go to school because you were afraid of bullying? What ways have you tried to change it?
What do you think parents can do to help stop bullying?
Have you or your friends left other kids out on purpose? Do you think that was bullying? Why or why not?
What do you usually do when you see bullying going on?
Do you ever see kids at your school being bullied by other kids? How does it make you feel?
Have you ever tried to help someone who is being bullied? What happened? What would you do if it happens again?

Get more ideas for talking with children - PDF about life and about bullying. If concerns come up, be sure to respond.

There are simple ways that parents and caregivers can keep up-to-date with kids’ lives.

Read class newsletters and school flyers. Talk about them at home.
Check the school website
Go to school events
Greet the bus driver
Meet teachers and counselors at “Back to School” night or reach out by email
Share phone numbers with other kids’ parents

Teachers and school staff also have a role to play.

Encourage Kids to Do What They Love

Help kids take part in activities, interests, and hobbies they like. Kids can volunteer, play sports, sing in a chorus, or join a youth group or school club. These activities give kids a chance to have fun and meet others with the same interests. They can build confidence and friendships that help protect kids from bullying.

Model How to Treat Others with Kindness and Respect

Kids learn from adults’ actions. By treating others with kindness and respect, adults show the kids in their lives that there is no place for bullying. Even if it seems like they are not paying attention, kids are watching how adults manage stress and conflict, as well as how they treat their friends, colleagues, and families.

What Is Bullying | StopBullying.gov

Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. Both kids who are bullied and who bully others may have serious, lasting problems.

In order to be considered bullying, the behavior must be aggressive and include:

An Imbalance of Power: Kids who bully use their power—such as physical strength, access to embarrassing information, or popularity—to control or harm others. Power imbalances can change over time and in different situations, even if they involve the same people.
Repetition: Bullying behaviors happen more than once or have the potential to happen more than once.

Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose.

Types of Bullying
Where and When Bullying Happens
Frequency of Bullying

Types of Bullying

There are three types of bullying:

Verbal bullying is saying or writing mean things. Verbal bullying includes:
- Teasing
- Name-calling
- Inappropriate sexual comments
- Taunting
- Threatening to cause harm
Social bullying, sometimes referred to as relational bullying, involves hurting someone’s reputation or relationships. Social bullying includes:
- Leaving someone out on purpose
- Telling other children not to be friends with someone
- Spreading rumors about someone
- Embarrassing someone in public
Physical bullying involves hurting a person’s body or possessions. Physical bullying includes:
- Hitting/kicking/pinching
- Spitting
- Tripping/pushing
- Taking or breaking someone’s things
- Making mean or rude hand gestures

Where and When Bullying Happens

Bullying can occur during or after school hours. While most reported bullying happens in the school building, a significant percentage also happens in places like on the playground or the bus. It can also happen travelling to or from school, in the youth’s neighborhood, or on the Internet.

Frequency of Bullying

There are two sources of federally collected data on youth bullying:

The 2019 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey (National Center for Education Statistics and Bureau of Justice) indicates that, nationwide, about 22% of students ages 12–18 experienced bullying.
The 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) indicates that, nationwide, 19. 5% of students in grades 9–12 report being bullied on school property in the 12 months preceding the survey.

how to deal with the problem? Advice from the psychologist "Aitigenio" - Itgenio on vc.ru

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Today, children may be bullied at school if they are not in their home state.

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We emphasize that we do not approve anything and hope that this will not happen. But there is a possibility, and, therefore, we need to talk about it! It is necessary to take care of the safety of children, regardless of their origin.

This topic is very important, because harassment and discrimination only breed violence. Ignoring bullying, attributing it to age or encouraging talk about who is bad and who is good, people feed ethnic hatred. Although it is not the people who make the decisions, it is they who always suffer - civilians and children, unfortunately, including.

Let's just focus on the children now. What should you do if your child has been bullied at school because of their background?

You need to clearly understand what bullying is .

This is a process that affects the victim, leaving a traumatic imprint. It's not just "unpopularity" when they don't really want to communicate with a child in comparison with others. Bullying is the systematic (long-term) exposure to violence (physical and / or psychological) from a group of people or from one person, but with the support of a group of people.

Bullying also affects other participants: bystanders and aggressors. It will be difficult for them to build trusting, healthy relationships with people in the future.

WHAT TO DO?

Do not respond aggressively, i.e. do not come to school with a scandal, do not use derogatory phrases about other nationalities, even if their representatives are offenders of your child.

Do not hush up! We need publicity for this problem, because harassment against the backdrop of the current situation is the extreme that does not correspond to humanistic values. And with publicity by adults - parents, teachers, school administration - you can achieve a settlement.

It is important to pay public attention to a greater extent not to the child who suffers from bullying, because this can cause the opposite effect if the accent is excessive (the victim will be bullied even more, as her weakness in comparison with the aggressors is emphasized). Pay attention to bullying itself as a phenomenon and how this particular bullying of innocent children is fundamentally at odds with the idea that people want a peaceful sky above their heads. Violence breeds only violence.

When talking about a child, it can be more effective to focus on positive, important traits, on warm and non-violent communication within the family, to show that you and your child are the same peaceful and good people who deserve respect and acceptance.

When communicating with a child, say that he did nothing wrong, he did not deserve such an attitude and that it is wrong to judge people by nationality, no matter what happens between states.

You yourself need to be an example: to tell that people are different, nationality does not determine personality, but there are stereotypes that are used in jokes. Often they are harmless and socially acceptable, but sometimes ideas about the differences between peoples develop into hatred, and this divides people.

You can discuss with your child how he is coping, how he is holding up, how he is going to school (this is support through talking about feelings). Ask how situations of bullying occur: what the child is told and under what circumstances, what the child responds to. Maybe he says “Get off me, you yourself are such and such (there is something impartial here)”. The main thing in this situation is not to condemn the child, to express understanding: “I see that you are angry and it’s unpleasant for you, you are probably already tired of these bullying.”

You can offer the child just as an experiment to try to answer in a different way: “You are unfairly assessing me by nationality, this is wrong. Nationality does not define a person, the fact that you constantly reproach me for this is rude and unfair”

Unfortunately, bullying children may not change their behavior so quickly and easily, so it is important to draw the attention of teachers and administration to the phenomenon of bullying, and possibly involve parents if they themselves are not radical.

You can also contact us for emergency psychological help. In the current circumstances, we try to support children, parents and each other, because this is very important now.

There are very informative manuals on this site.

Here is an up-to-date manual on the national sign.

Here you will find materials for the child and parents, as well as for teachers.

What to do if you find out that your child is a bully. Yes, beats and humiliates others

There seems to be no parent who would be ready for this - to find out that their child is involved in bullying or even one of the instigators. For parents, this news can be a real trauma. Psychologist Irina Katin-Yartseva compiled instructions on what to do in such cases and how to help both the child and herself.

At this moment, we are experiencing the collapse of the usual ideas about ourselves as wise and good adults and about a son or daughter as a good and kind child. The first thing I want to say is: “No, this cannot be, this is some kind of mistake. My child couldn't do that. Yes, what kind of persecution is there, just a conflict, they quarreled, it happens. Moreover, the real organizer of bullying is not always in sight. Any child in a situation of bullying can be "captured" by the collective and appointed as the "executioner" in order to fulfill the will of the group.

The main task is to try, while remaining calm and polite, to find out what happened. Preferably with several witnesses to the events.

1. How is bullying different from conflict and hostility? How to understand that this is really bullying?

The main difference between bullying and its essence is concerted and systematic violence, intentional harm. A child can be beaten, pushed, pinched, teased, brought to tears, humiliated, called names, pointedly ignored. He can be threatened, taken away, spoiled or hidden things. All this in relation to inequality - the strong attack the weak.

If there is no mistake, the bad news is confirmed, the most natural reaction is anger and a desire to punish the guilty person. Anger at one's own child, a teacher who allowed bullying, at the victim ("well, it's not just that they began to bully him") or her parents, at oneself, in the end.

It is important to restrain oneself and not harm anyone in this state. It is usually difficult for parents to endure such emotions alone, so if there is an opportunity to share with loved ones, it is worth doing it.

2. Why did this happen?

For most children, it is important to feel part of a group, to unite around emotionally meaningful activities. If there is no such activity, then it often arises spontaneously - children can unite against someone.

This happens especially quickly in a society filled with aggression and xenophobia. The group is covered by the excitement of hunting, ecstasy, euphoria. They feel good and right. Especially active in bullying are children who are insecure, dependent on the assessment of others, or even who themselves have experienced violence.

If the adults responsible for working with the children's team (for example, teachers) do not pay attention to what is happening or even voluntarily add fuel to the fire, the situation gets worse. Without the help of adults, children are no longer able to cope with it. So don't wait for things to get better on their own.

3. And now what to do?

The first and main task of adults is to try to stop bullying. Of course, all children involved in bullying need help, and to each his own. But bullying itself is a phenomenon from the field of social processes, a disease of the group, so in order to fight it, you need to work with the entire group of children. Individual work and conversations with the child are not enough here.

In addition to the obvious harm to the victim and observers, bullying has a bad effect on the productivity of the group and each of its members (it drains all emotional and intellectual resources). The experience of impunity, the illusion of one's strength and rightness, also harm the bully himself. He may develop antisocial personality traits, and there may also be problems in close relationships.

4. How not to talk to a child about bullying?

Scold, shout, beat. This is how you reinforce the child's confidence that the world consists of the strong and the weak. And the strong show aggression towards the weak.

Shame, cause guilt. Shame and fear of shame, guilt is one of the bullies' vulnerabilities, which push them to self-affirmation at the expense of the victim.

To put pressure on pity by describing the feelings, sufferings of the victim. This only adds to the contempt for her helplessness.

5. What is the right way to talk about this?

State clearly what is happening: "What you are doing is violence." Most often, children do not realize what is happening, for them everything may look like a harmless game or a manifestation of personal hostility. They do not see the situation systematically.

Ask to put yourself in the place of the victim , describing specific actions: “Just imagine, you come to class, no one greets you, but only giggle among themselves, looking at you. Your things seem to be accidentally dropped on the floor, on the test you are poked with a pen in the back, and when you turn around, your neighbors loudly complain to the teacher that you are cheating. At recess, they push you and lock you in the toilet, and then they hide your briefcase, throwing all its contents into the trash can.

Indicate your attitude to what is happening: “This is a serious problem, and not only yours, but the whole group (class, company). There are problems, diseases that affect not people, but collectives. So it happened to you. You need to take urgent action, you need help.”

You can watch the film about bullying (Scarecrow, Lord of the Flies) together. Empathize with the feelings of the child who presented himself as a victim. Show an example of how to deal with this - "yes, that would be hard."

6. How to talk to the parents of an injured child?

Without interrupting or making excuses, listen to everything the victim's parents say. They now have a lot of fear, indignation and resentment for their child. Show that you understand the seriousness of what is happening and are ready to participate in solving the problem.

Tell us what you have already done (talking to your child, learning about bullying and how to stop it) and what you are going to do: find someone who can work with the group. It can be a school psychologist, director, class teacher, invited specialist who knows how to work with such a problem. You can form a group of parents who will take on this work.

7. How to work with the whole team? And who should do it?

There are proven and effective step-by-step methods for working with a group of children affected by bullying. It is better if a professional who is competent in this particular area will work with the team, who definitely will not harm with his advice (prohibition of complaints, lectures or blaming the victim). For example, someone from the Travlinet team.

If there is no such professional available, then you need to find someone who is ready to take responsibility for helping the class, study the instructions for working with bullying and have a few conversations.