Bully Repellant

We prepare our kids for the environment each day as they walk out the door.  Warm clothes protect against cold weather.  Sun-screen stops harmful UV rays.  Bug repellant helps discourage bug bites.  We also need to arm our kids with bully repellant.

Bully Symptoms:

I don’t think kids who bully are bad people.  I believe these two symptoms are key:

1.       Hurt people, hurt people.  When a child lashes out at another, is it really about that specific situation or is it more likely a manifestation of other pain in that child’s life and they don’t have skills to express positively?

2.       We do better once we know better.  If a child has been witness to behavior that is negative, without open dialogue to explain what is an appropriate and what is not, how do they know to behave better?

This Wednesday is another ‘anti-bullying day’ to raise awareness by wearing pink.  Bully repellant is not just the colour pink, it is real work between kids and parents.  I encourage us to broaden the conversation and also focus on ourselves as parents, and the bully’s themselves.   

Bully Repellant Ingredients:

·         Open discussion about how to treat people with respect, command respect in return, and stand by others who are in need of help.

·         Remove blinders from parents who think that excessive aggression from their child will protect them against others or make them strong adults.  It only makes them aggressive.

·         Words hurt, so the old saying ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” need to be removed from our repertoire as parents.  Words DO hurt and in this information age kids have multiple gadgets that allow other kids to use words as weapons 24/.  We need to arm our kids with strategies, not tired aphorisms that are no longer true.

·         Telling is right.  While it may be annoying when a child is constantly telling on another, it is 100% necessary.  Kids MUST be encouraged to speak to an adult when another child hurts or scares them.  I would rather have 100 harmless complaints brought to my attention than miss the one opportunity to deal with a valid offense.

·         Recognize the lies we tell ourselves as parents.  It is not ok for one kid to tell another ‘I am going to kill you’ just because parents heard that as kids and are ‘ok’ now.  It is not justifiable to say a boy is only harassing a girl because ‘that just means he likes her’.   

I put bully repellant on my kids every day.  I still expect them to experience a 'bite' every now and then, which is why the dialogue in my house is a continuous circle.  We also put a mirror in front of ourselves as parents to see how our words sound coming out of our kids’ mouths.  If they would be wrong from the child, then we need to change our words too. 

Let’s prepare our kids for the world they actually live in now, not the world their parents grew up in that no longer exists.