Is there a difference between frenemy, arch nemesis or a bully?  Maybe, maybe not.  All have a long term effect on a child’s life and often into adulthood.  I recently watched You Again.  Funny movie, but the reality of how cruel classmates can be and how long lasting the effects were obvious.  I guess I was lucky and I didn’t have a bully.  I do know they exist and I know they can make life awful.  I worry for my children.  I worry that children are becoming more desensitized to cruelty and meanness.

Why has frenemy, arch nemesis and bully become accepted behavior and commonly accepted words?  Should our kids really have to “toughen” up?  Do we really have to tell our kids, “Don’t let it get to you.”  Is this healthy?  NO!  Every person should be able to feel safe and good about themselves.  Bullying does not have to be accepted as “normal” in growing up.  Does it exist?  Yes.  Is it commonplace?  Perhaps.  What exactly is bullying?

PBS television station wrote the following about the subject:

“Physical bullying means:

• Hitting, kicking, or pushing someone…or even just threatening to do it
• Stealing, hiding or ruining someone’s things
• Making someone do things he or she don’t want to do

Verbal bullying means:

• Name-calling
• Teasing
• Insulting

Relationship bullying means:

• Refusing to talk to someone
• Spreading lies or rumors about someone
• Making someone do things he or she doesn’t want to do

What do all these things have in common? They’re examples of ways one person can make another person feel hurt, afraid, or uncomfortable. When these are done to someone more than once, and usually over and over again for a long period of time, that’s bullying.

The reason why one kid would want to bully another kid is this: when you make someone feel bad, you gain power over him or her. Power makes people feel like they’re better than another person, and then that makes them feel really good about themselves. Power also makes you stand out from the crowd. It’s a way to get attention from other kids, and even from adults.”

Who are bullies?  It can be “friends”, family, classmates, teammates, “the kid who has it all,” taller, shorter, etc.  They all have this in common:  they are people who someone else or something is making them feel inferior so they are picking on someone else to feel important or validated.

How do you deal with bullies?  What do you teach your children about bullies?  Ideas?

Bullying has been making headlines in the news for sometime, but there were some extreme cases that were made public last year.  Many parents may be concerned about bullying, especially as children head back to school.  Here are some tips on identifying bullying & helping your child deal with a bully.

Physical or emotional differences make children targets for bullies. Being a bully or a victim of a bully puts children at risk for engaging in violent behaviors, such as frequent fighting and carrying a weapon, according to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Bullying comes in different forms. It is commonly thought of as an actual or threatened act of physical violence. But name calling, spreading rumors, unrelenting teasing, and deliberately excluding a child from an activity can be other forms of bullying. Racial slurs, mocking cultural traditions, and unwanted physical contact are bullying.

Signs your child is being bullied may be physical injuries, inventing reasons to avoid going to school, changing routines or routes to school, and the sudden disappearance of belongings.

How should you react when your children have a close encounter with a bully?

The worst thing you can do, experts say, is tell them to learn karate, carry a concealed weapon, or go back and beat up the bully. Responding to a bully with aggression simply perpetuates the cycle of violence and fighting. It doesn’t solve the problem because the bully gets the satisfaction of seeing the victim upset and one or both children is likely to get hurt.

A better solution — requiring more parental support and involvement – is to try to resolve conflicts verbally instead of physically.

Of course, addressing a bully calmly may not have an immediate effect on his or her behavior, admits Myrna B. Shure, Ph.D., author of Raising a Thinking Child: Help Your Young Child to Resolve Everyday Conflicts and Get Along with Others. But, says Dr. Shure, “if a bully is spoken to nicely and calmly, it may be a whole different way of talking that he or she has never heard before.”

Click here for a list of specific tips for helping your child deal with a bully.

Editor’s note: Sarah Moore is a featured blogger on CuddleBugs. She’ll be posting a two-part series this week on TweenBeat.

If you are just tuning in, please read Part One of my story here.

So where did my husband and I go wrong?  What happened?  I need someone or something to blame but I’m running in circles right now trying to find an answer where there might be none.

I know that her mother and father did not get along while they were married and had an especially ugly divorce and custody fight. Could that be it?  I just don’t know and Marissa had a hard time communicating with us about why she behaved in this way.

I considered the possibility of getting her some counseling but my husband is strongly against this, as if it would be admitting there might be something wrong with her, or even us, but I see it as a way to help this confused 11-year old confront her issues.

We spoke with Marissa on this topic and what she had done for a long time that night, and well into the weekend.  We tried to make her connect her actions and words to the whys and hows of the situation.  I even made her read the note aloud so she would hear how ugly those words were.  I showed her articles about recent bullying instances and the devastating results for the victims, such as suicide, failing school, school shootings, etc.

She was in tears during some of this, but I could not stop until she understood this was not a harmless joke.  Even telling the child she didn’t want to be his friend was mean, but then what she had written was despicable.

We asked Marissa to write apology notes to her teacher, to the child the note was directed at, and most importantly, to God.  We also have been praying more and reading the Bible together more as a family.  I am trying to find the positive in all this, so hopefully she has learned a valuable lesson.

Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.  Any thoughts on counseling?

Editor’s note: Sarah Moore is a featured blogger on CuddleBugs. She’ll be posting a two-part series this week on TweenBeat.

For those of you who don’t know me, I used to teach at an alternative school in the area, so I have a lot of experience with negative childhood behaviors, including bullying.

Usually the students would act out for reasons such as anger issues, various problems stemming from childhood, abuse, neglect, you name it.  We were trained in how to react and respond to these children and help them deal with what was going on with them.  Different methods seemed to help each child, and eventually I learned many ways to do so.  So why can’t I use this experience and training in my own household?

I never in a million years thought that I would see some of this disrespectful and downright hateful behavior from my own stepdaughter.  Marissa is a very intelligent, creative, and thoughtful person.  She has not been abused, neglected, or anything like that, so where did this all come from?

Apparently she was part of a group of kids that wrote a particularly nasty note to another child, telling him that they no longer wanted to be his friend.  Marissa was the author of said note, and even though she wrote it down it while someone else dictated it, in my book she is just as guilty as the rest of the group.

Marissa tried to defend her actions by telling us that the child was being mean to her and her friends and telling them they were stupid and to shut up, but we did not entertain that at all.  It is NEVER OK to hurt someones feelings, regardless of why, and I thought she knew this.

You may be reading this thinking, kids will be kids, but I am not finished yet.  In the letter there was some name-calling and some choice words, such as “gay.”  So guess what?  This “innocent” note just turned into a hate crime.

When I read this my heart broke, seeing what Marissa had done.  As Christians my husband and I believe that homosexuality is wrong, but our way of dealing with this is to love others even if we disagree with their lifestyles!  Never is it condoned to bully others and call them names, whether they are different than us or not.

To be continued…More on Thursday.

Have any of your kids either been the victim of bullying or the bully?  How did you handle this?

We’ve all seen the news recently and bullying has come to the front page.  What is it that we can do to stop bullying?  How can parents and educators join forces to make sure that the consequences of bullying aren’t fatal. 

First, I think an ounce of prevention is worth one million pounds of intervention; that being said, how do you prevent bullying?  Stop Bullying Now suggests that schools and communities can make bullying an unattractive option by implementing some of the following strategies:

1.  Increase the consequences of bullying.  This makes perfect sense; if penalties are harsh, the punishment can act as a deterrent.  You can’t force a kid to behave a certain way, especially as they get older.  However, you can make it unattractive by offering stiff punishments. 

2.  Maintain a sense of belonging.  Groups and cliques are often breeding grounds for bullying.  It’s important that our schools make sure that certain kids are being ostracized or otherwise rejected. 

3.  Character/conscious education.  It is vitally important that our kids know that bullying is wrong, can hurt people, and have dire consequences. 

4.  Train the staff.  It’s important that our teachers know how to recognize some of the signs that may go unnoticed.  Sudden withdrawal, a reluctance to attend school or other signs may be difficult to pick up on. 

What do you think about the bullying that’s been going on in the news lately?  I don’t know if it’s more prevalent that when we went to school or if it’s just publicized more.  What do you think?  What can our schools do?