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The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

71–80 of 449 posts

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#71
One aspect of today's society that would have seemed strange to anyone 100 years ago is that any verbal/psychological abuse of any kind is bundled as more ok than minor violence.

Violence is almost never the answer, but modern bullies seem to be artificially building situations where it's the only answer, since they know they'd get their way otherwise.

It's true that many abusers become this way due to violence at home, but abandoning any option in responding to force with force seems absurd.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#72
post #52

Heh, decent timing. My last CBT session ended with me realising one of my issues may be a lasting effect of bullying. Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol" Boiled it down and down and down until we hit the core of the issue and realised I don't want to poke my head up and ship code/sites/ideas/etc because I believe I'll be bullied for it. In school doing anything th…

yeah, when I was trying to figure out 'What is the moment before the split second "my fingers just opened a new tab" effect, I realized so much of adhd is really consciously or subconsciously:

emotional flinching

distraction is just running away from a feeling. I don't actually care about the content of the new tab, i'm not addicted to the internet, blah blah

----------

BTW, The old book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin really helped me here-- it's on libgen or you can youtube the authors name to see some of his one on one sessions he did with people before he died. (You can do it yourself without a person tho, it's just having a kind listener helps you stick with it)

it's NOT about adhd or focusing on stuff lol, it's the name for his diy technique of 'figuring out what the feeling is' and unlocks all other therapy stuff that you may do after

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#73
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> keeps the bullied compliant and the bullies in charge I've seen some of this in our local schools: meetings held with the head teacher to "hear both sides" when one side is a bully asserting their right to bully the other side. > kids in an actual martial art I had this idea, based on my experience as a kid, but never actually got around to enrolling them. They're in college now and so I guess it wasn't necessary.

> I've seen some of this in our local schools: meetings held with the head teacher to "hear both sides" when one side is a bully asserting their right to bully the other side. This is endemic in modern culture. The need to treat two opposing opinions as equally valid and balance them against each other as if there's some sane middle-ground to be found. There's no middle-ground between slavery and non-slavery. Or betw…

Yes 100%, there's a reason for this. Distinguishing right from wrong is an absolute act, and we have been conditioned to associate that with religious zealotry or raving lunacy. By hearing both sides, people are shying away from taking responsibility. Also, by holding up an ethos (e.g. bullying is categorically wrong) to others, we hold up a mirror to ourselves. Hypocrisy is instantly revealed then. (Note for example that the religious right has no problem being hypocrites ).

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we could be honest with our kids that sometimes you need to be mean in order to not be destroyed by mean people.

I consider people who aren’t honest with children about this to be bad people: They’re helping the abuse by lying to those children in their role as a trusted adult.

I hear what you’re saying, but I think it’s important to take a more nuanced viewpoint rather than reducing such parents to “bad people”.

I think it’s fair to criticize such people, or point out why it’s a problematic approach, but many parents are just trying to do what they believe is the right thing, misguided though it may be.

Education and correcting misconceptions is important, and applying a binary mindset to anyone who shields their kids in this way is not going to move the needle, nor is it likely a fair representation of these individuals.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure if there’s data/studies on this, but I feel that bullying is a bigger problem in the US than in eg Europe and Asia. If so, would like to see more discussion on why that is and how we could improve things by comparing

I came to similar conclusion. My children go to an elementary school in Canada and there is bullying even in good schools. The things that these little kids do is incomprehensible to me. I went to elementary school in USSR and I never saw what my children experience in Canada(at least I don't remember it, but I do know that the schools in USSR had bullying issues with teenagers). Is it because children have too much…

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Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#76
post #28

It's actually a different problem than most people realize. What happens is that you have criminal assault and abuse being tolerated by adults and then blaming the victims. To try to understand, take the behavior of the "bullies" and imagine it is being done by adults. It really comes down to a lack of responsibility and accountability for managing the behavior of children in schools. Instead of dealing with children…

It seems to be very hard to distinguish between bullying and rough play. Rough play is a developmental requirement (particularly for young boys) across the hominoid clade (and likely wider). Being denied it also has real and lifelong consequences. For further reading, Frans de Waal has done a lot of work in this area.

Educational policy informed by this research usually looks not to intervene in physical conflict between equally matched (by size/age) peers. It also looks at conflict management and resolution as a primary responsibility of the peer group, rather than the adults/teachers, with the escalation path being to older peers before adults.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#77

"School is the only place where modern humans will experience violence".

Nah, that doesn't ring true to me. I got into plenty of scraps during the summer when I was a kid. Nothing that rose to the asymmetry I would describe as bullying, but certainly it was violence. And besides the overt fights, many of the games we played were essentially organized fights.

Maybe things are different now, with kids spending too much time indoors playing video games instead of running around in the woods. But I think violence is generally an outcome from boys being together and relatively unsupervised. The insidious part about violence in schools is the double-jeopardy you face from administration; first you get your ass kicked by the bully, then you get your ass kicked again by the bureaucracy putting you through the wringer.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#78
post #28

It's actually a different problem than most people realize. What happens is that you have criminal assault and abuse being tolerated by adults and then blaming the victims. To try to understand, take the behavior of the "bullies" and imagine it is being done by adults. It really comes down to a lack of responsibility and accountability for managing the behavior of children in schools. Instead of dealing with children…

>These assaults are actually even more critical to address in childhood because as they are allowed to form patterns that persist in criminal assaults and fraud in adulthood.

It's this kind of logic that creates it actually. Trying to create Uber safe environments for hypothetical outcomes results in those behaviors being suppressed and mutated later. Children are designed to bully, the same as every other mammal species plays when young. If they were not, you wouldn't find it in every place where children are throughout the planet.

We can only mitigate severe effects. Smaller schools is the most significant step, but it will never happen.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#79

This reminds me that I should write down the experiences I remember as a child, including being chased over three miles by half a dozen kids. I finally crossed into an older woman’s yard, she recognized what was happening and asked me inside. I’ll never forget the beautiful polar bear rug in her living room. She got her keys and drove me home. Lucky for me I sprouted between elementary and junior high, I also got mea…

I wish we could be honest with our kids that sometimes you need to be mean in order to not be destroyed by mean people.

This is a difficult lesson to learn and also can be a difficult lesson to act upon (unfortunately).

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#80
post #28

It's actually a different problem than most people realize. What happens is that you have criminal assault and abuse being tolerated by adults and then blaming the victims. To try to understand, take the behavior of the "bullies" and imagine it is being done by adults. It really comes down to a lack of responsibility and accountability for managing the behavior of children in schools. Instead of dealing with children…

I’m not sure if there’s data/studies on this, but I feel that bullying is a bigger problem in the US than in eg Europe and Asia. If so, would like to see more discussion on why that is and how we could improve things by comparing

The US compares relatively well because, despite having comprehensive education, the system is also designed to segregate schooling areas.

In Europe, bullying is worst in countries with comprehensive systems (UK/Nordics/Eastern Europe, unsurprisingly they are countries that have left-wing education systems built for the social justice goals of adults, not learning outcomes of kids). I believe it is as bad or worse in Asia although for different reasons.

Btw, there are also quite good stats about sexual violence against girls and, unfortunately, you actually see these levels are highest in comprehensive systems in Europe. This is likely due to under-reporting elsewhere but it is very strange to see somewhere like the UK come out worse than Afghanistan in violence against girls. I think people should also ask why this kind of stuff isn't known (again, it is because schools are designed for social justice for adults, not for kids...it is an unfortunate reality of our world).

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