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The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

81–90 of 449 posts

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

#81
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is that exactly, there is some weird purification/concentration of social things that only happen at school. Is it the spike of age cohorts (+/-6mo) all thrown together without any regulating factors that would occur with older wiser children (say +6 years) being able to correct the misbehaving individuals? Is it a factor of the sheer outnumbering encountered from high student to adult ratios? Is bullying less li…

If an adult attacks someone they can go to jail or at the minimum are arrested for assault. In school the consequences are much less serious

That's nothing to do with school though, just youth. Kids who get into fights in the summer months away from school aren't sent to jail for it like adults. Being at or away from a school isn't a factor in that difference.

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

#82
post #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 re…

Yeah the whole "ok but why do I respond like that?" is a massive focus now that I've realised there are all these internal rules I've been following since early teens and possibly even younger.

I'll absolutely give that a look into, thank you!

Also for nerds who have yet to consider it: CBT is like debugging code, except the code is your brain. I'd highly recommend looking into it where possible, especially if you are opposed or wary of the "and how does that make you feel?" style of therapy. Fascinating field, and quite helpful for me so far.

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

#83
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 bet…

An interesting approach I read - I think it was a novel, honestly, but may have been an autobiography - was that fights were not just tolerated but sanctioned, with one big proviso: In the gym, with boxing gloves and headgear on, and fists only. Going down or taking a knee ends the fight.

Let 'em work out the tension, but with very minimal chance of hurting anything.

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

#84
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 bet…

Rough play is voluntary, being a victim of bullying isn't. I say this as someone who engaged in rough play, got bullied, and was a bully, at different times.

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

#86
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

My personal experience was that Western schooling was much kinder than Asian (Indian) schooling (parent's job had me moving countries every 3 years). Having been a bit of an outsider in both systems (didn't have the years of shared history in Western circles and accent was too American in Asian circles) and extremely timid, while I did initially get bullied in Western schools, it was nowhere near as pervasive, underhanded or nasty as it was in the Asian schools I attended.

In the Western system I could more often rely on just ignoring or complaining to a teacher to result in some action, in the Asian schools I went to, many of the teachers and other parents seemed almost complicit in the bullying (somewhat unsurprisingly, especially the English teachers).

I still remember that on my first day in an Indian school in 4th grade after having gone to school for ~3 years in NY, I had been mocked and called stupid in front of the class by the math teacher for writing out how I answered a problem differently from what had been taught to the rest of the class. Completely ruined me on math for several years because it made me too hesitant to ask questions about fundamental things I didn't understand and as a result I had terrible fundamentals. I only really managed to get over that by spending the entirety of 8th grade self-teaching myself math after school.

The way I like to think of it these days is that Western education made me enjoy learning and helped build up my confidence, while Asian education made me cynical and better at reading people (which isn't a bad thing to me now, but I'd still rather never go through that again).

Of course this is just anecdotal so it doesn't say a lot overall.

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

#87
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…

"If I excel, I will be bullied" or "I need to bring things with me to parties/events because people don't value me for just being me"

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

#88

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…

Play dates really create needless friction because they don't allow children to click organically. The restoration of the public realm, making it safe for children, is the most pressing challenge for america.

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

#89
post #38

I was bullied pretty severely as a kid. So bad in fact I was put on medication just to deal with it. I was a weaker kid when I was younger owing to the fact I was sick a lot. In America there is a concept of "zero tolerance" that keeps the bullied compliant and the bullies in charge. It was not until I started to get very violent that the bullying stopped. I would fight at a moments notice even sometimes in classroom…

While this will stop the bullying there is a serious risk of this affecting your ability to get into a competitive high school or college. My cousin defended a friend from a bully in middle school and the bully's parents called the cops on him. The charges were eventually dropped but the record stayed around and almost kept him out of the highschool he wanted to go to.

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

#90
I completely agree about the problem, and some of this thread has the answer: fight back. Being adults, we naturally focus on what the adults can do. Of course if someone in authority sees bad behavior, they should stop it.

The problem is all the bad behavior they don't see. The bullies just learn to do it when no adults are watching. Teaching the kid how to fight back is a great solution and several answers have said that.

But suppose he or she just can't (sick, handicapped, uncoordinated, tiny, etc.)?

This is where the kids who are not being bullied can step in. Teach your big strong kid it's not cool to just watch it happen; confront the bully yourself. Protect the kids who can't protect themselves.

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