As an employee of a school district one of the biggest concerns the administrators deal with (and teach us about) is the trouble of bullying. Bullying causes kids to commit suicide, have bad lives, and hurts academic performance. It's not just that bullying messes up those who are bullied, but it's also something that messes up those who bully. Essentially it makes them little psychopaths in training...thus bullying is something that we are told to always be vigilant about.
But I'm not so sure that we always handle it correctly. Usually the general process is that adults are supposed to step in and stop these things. We can't trust that kids will do this, we are told, and so the solution (and the responsibility) results on the shoulders of adults.
I wonder, though, whether we are doing this right. While adults need to stop bullying where it starts, I wonder if we also need to teach the kids who are bullied how to deal with this better. Rather than just running to adults, are we teaching them to be proactive? At some point they will not have adults around to fix their problems...so what are they doing to do about this now?
Maybe the problem is that we don't know how to really teach kids. Because there are bad kid-centered solutions: "Stop being a wimp so people won't bully you." "Fight back if they hurt you." "If they make fun of you, make fun of them 7 times worse." "Just be an all-around jerk so nobody will want to mess with you." Yeah, these are bad ideas.
But we could make good ideas: A. Encourage them to not be thin-skinned. Sometimes I wonder if we call everything bullying; at times on my bus I see a kid who gets upset because somebody doesn't want to talk with them; they're not being bullied, but we talk about it so much that THEY think they are. B. Help them to see that the opinion of bullies is not really worth their time. Why do bullies get all the attention? If we showed them for what they were, maybe kids wouldn't think anything of them, but instead see them as sad people trying to get attention. C. Genuinely promote the good things in life, and teach people to stop navel-gazing. We so often focus on all the bad that happens that we do not take time to enjoy the good.
I don't know...maybe the adults should step in and fix all this, since likely the adults of today were the bullied and bullies of their youth. We should see it as it is. But letting the kids fix this problem, giving them ownership, is a really important thing as well.
