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The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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

#111

Post by thegrimmest »

david-gpu wrote: post #105
thegrimmest wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning how to respond to antisocial behaviour by a peer, and being able to resolve conflict independently, are two very important skills that it's critical to learn. Being seen as someone who needs adult help to resolve peer conflict is socially disastrous for young people. We do children no favours by intervening in this developmental process.

> We do children no favours by intervening in this developmental process. Will you do the same when your child is being bullied? How do you think that may affect them and their relationship with you? How do you think a child feels when they realize that the adults around them do not have their back? What does it do to their sense of safety and their self-esteem? I have lived through this and have my personal take on…

Like with most things, I think the right move for an adult is to help the child solve the problem themselves, rather than do it for them. As other posts have mentioned, learning when and how to apply violence is a critical skill. We (particularly children) do not live in a post-violence society. Children should of course not feel abandoned by those closest to them, but being overprotective can have its own negative consequences for development.

It's clearly a fine line to walk, but if you're being bullied then what you need is to learn how to address/discourage that behaviour - not an intervention. Otherwise all you're doing is deferring the learning experience until next time. Past a certain window it's very hard to learn this skill, and you can be stuck with a helpless mentality for your whole life.

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

#112

Post by yourapostasy »

blue039 wrote: 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…

> School systems are DESIGNED to protect bullies and subjugate the bullied. In America, they are prisons.

Most US public schools and low-rate private schools are like this. If your children are in an ultra-competitive public or private school however, the bullies are tossed out, the schools confident in the 100% ironclad certainty there is another family literally grateful for the opportunity to place their child in the new opening within 24 hours. The student body goes through cycles of forgetting this until a new bully is expelled, then the bullying simmers down to much more subtle forms.

In the ultra-competitive private boarding schools, the kind of over the top physical bullying you hear about in public schools is nearly non-existent because they will expel on far lower thresholds for bullying.

But yes, if your children are in US public school or you are a child in a US public school, generally speaking fighting back regardless of the zero tolerance consequences tends to stop the bullying better than going through toothless school policies. Bullies tend to prefer soft targets over porcupines. If you are being bullied and choose to fight back though, then go in at a location with adults to intervene quickly nearby expecting to get hurt and lose (in the sense the bully has the physical upper hand), but never defeated (in the sense you and the bully have to be separated before you stop). If it is a group doing the bullying, go for the leader.

The US public school systems' bullying problem won't stop until the bullies' parents know that they have a no-recourse, no-litigation-overturning consequence to bullying that sees their precious no-fault snowflake expelled to "lower class" schooling if they run out their options.

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

#113

Post by erdos4d »

macinjosh wrote: post #91
TylerE wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am here for safe and supervised middle school duels. It would have helped me a lot. I went to a strict religious school and a kid who bullied me over years pushed me too far one day and I started after him, got maybe one kick to his leg in. Teachers stopped me immediately, but never did the same for the years of verbal abuse mocking me for my weight though. I ended up getting spanked by the principal with a thick w…

You should get the straight facts on that kid and what he did and confront the school over it. They obviously failed across the board with him and probably someone got hurt for him to get time. They could have done things to correct his behavior, instead they punished you for lashing out against his abuse. This needs to show up when people search that school so other parents know how they really are and avoid sending their kids there.

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

corobo wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by cannaceo »

thegrimmest wrote: post #94
anonym29 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Learning how to respond to antisocial behaviour by a peer, and being able to resolve conflict independently, are two very important skills that it's critical to learn. Being seen as someone who needs adult help to resolve peer conflict is socially disastrous for young people. We do children no favours by intervening in this developmental process.

"Solve the problem yourself". Yeah, you've never had to deal with being chased by bullies and having the shit kicked out of you for no reason. Bullying is not a conflict between peers anymore than a woman getting raped is a conflict between peers.

As an adult these problems are solved for you by either human resources, the police, or being able to avoid the situation. Maybe that's why you don't walk around the rough part of town alone at night. As a kid you have no control over your environment.

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

#117

Post by quacked »

myth_drannon wrote: post #66
granshaw wrote: post #50

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…

> Is it because of playdates culture and not being free to play on the street with neighbours after school which helps socializing kids?

All children need to be "socialized", which means "taught the local method of the art of civilization". Currently in the western world there IS no "local method of the art of civilization". There's barely even a "local people". Most people grow up around transplants and whirling hodgepodge of rapidly-evolving ethno-social practices that never comes close to stabilizing on a single, repeatable way of life.

The US's and Canada's failures to raise up kids to behave a certain way is due to the fact that the modern western world is in a local period of flux/chaos. Children rarely see their full-time working parents and live in environments where they have little freedom and few trustworthy allies that will remain with them throughout their whole lives. The several people I know who grew up in the USSR did not experience this, and while they experienced shortages, authoritarianism, and poverty, they also experienced very intensely local community with people who they understood and expected to live the same way. (This broke down across ethnic lines, of course.) The necessary fixes are far more pervasive and difficult than many people realize, and mostly start with "fixing the adults" rather than "fixing the kids".

Bullying is a deeply primal instinct, with the end result of establishing a social hierarchy with the most powerful and violent on top and people who will listen to them and provide goods and services on the bottom. The reason that adults who commit crimes end up in prison is that modern western governments keep a really well-armed and nasty gang on a leash (police) and have a system to deal with the bullies who don't learn how to keep their bullying in line with social acceptability. (For instance, you can emotionally torture an employee into depression, but you can't punch them in the face.) I believe that the bullying we're seeing children do now is closer to status-jockeying in a post-civilization world than as a consequence of our current society's setup. They're trying to establish hierarchies and social norms for themselves, because they've never observed or been taught any.

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

#118

Post by AtlasBarfed »

SapporoChris wrote: post #14
oifjsidjf wrote: post #6

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

A number of military personal might beg to differ with you. But I'm willing to hear justification for your comment.

Is that some manipulative jingoistic pro-military shaming?

A boxer obviously will see violence, so will a pigskin football player. Those are things they signed up for and the violence is part of the voluntary activity.

A soldier (or policeman) signs up to be in war, either an active one or one that might happen.

A high school student, a cube worker, a barista, a fireman, they do not sign up for violence.

The difference is that children have no choice but to go to school. They are sent to the slaughter.

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

#119

Post by zmgsabst »

thegrimmest wrote: post #94
anonym29 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Learning how to respond to antisocial behaviour by a peer, and being able to resolve conflict independently, are two very important skills that it's critical to learn. Being seen as someone who needs adult help to resolve peer conflict is socially disastrous for young people. We do children no favours by intervening in this developmental process.

Do you hold this same view about adults and police?

Are we denying women a chance at personal development by having police arrest rapists rather than forcing women to develop the necessary skills of interpersonal violence to defend themselves?

…where is the line?

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

#120

Post by troon-lover »

JamesBarney wrote: post #89
blue039 wrote: 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.

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