There’s a conversation around bullying that no one seems to be having. All forms of bullying; physical, emotional, cyber etc… Whenever a child feels that another child/adult is imposing themselves on them, or is making them feel threatened or hurt, then it’s bullying.
But here’s the thing; the question that is always asked by teachers or parents is “Are you being bullied?”, “Who is bullying you?” or “How can we help you not get bullied?”. Yet the question that doesn’t often get asked is “Are you the bully?”
I had an incident recently where I witnessed a child displaying bullying tendencies at a school gathering, so I waited for the opportunity where I could approach the parents and then very gently and conversationally glean their understanding of bullying. Perhaps to also try to understand their basic parenting techniques and have a conversation about what one would do if said bully was their OWN child. (Knowing full well that it was their child that was the bully). It would seem to me that most parents are just so relieved that their own child is not being bullied and therefore there’s no need to put energy into questioning what the course of action would be if their own child were a bully.
The tricky part here is, from my limited psychological understanding, is if a child is a bully, the last thing you would want to do is marginalise the child or pick them out of a crowd, because sometimes the root cause of their bullying tendencies is caused by the fact that the child is already feeling left out and their acting out is them trying to insinuate themselves into conversations and social circles in the only way they know.
They don’t always have the skill set or personality type to charm or politely make themselves available. This is what I understand: a bully is a person who is compromised socially, and so to compromise them even further socially doesn’t help the bully or the people around them. The difficulty here is that the approach to a bully is to do something so alien to them and counter-intuitive to you who seeks to confront the threat! And that is to give the bully some love. A little positive attention and care. More so than the other child who’s been the target of the bullying. I think we’re so conditioned to mollycoddle the victim that we do little to nothing to address the root cause of the problem and that requires giving time to the bully to help them assimilate and socialise and ultimately not bully any more. That would be a win-win. The bully stops being a bully and others are no longer bullied. Yet this doesn’t seem to be a conversation that is being had.
The other thing I found out almost immediately by having a conversation with the parents is that they were not very good when it came to the listening and engaging and that they were more comfortable imposing their opinions, feelings and conversation onto anyone that would listen. It reinforced my belief that bullying tendencies, which seems to have been a truth for the longest time, is a learned behaviour. Most of the time it’s said that the parents need to fix any form of bullying behaviour, but how are the bullies going to fix the bullying when the bullies don’t even know that they’re the bully or that their child has learnt to bully from them??
Ultimately it looks like the responsibility falls on those that are outside and empathetically become aware of the problem. I think the best course of action is, from one parent to another, if you do encounter a bully, or if your child is being bullied, find said bully and find out where they need a little bit of love, positive attention or some mild pass-you-in-the-hallways passive nurturing.
I feel that should be the solution. I don’t have the answers right now. This is just me thinking out loud. Which is what you do as a parent, you learn new things on the fly all the time.
By Darren Maule.