291–300 of 449 posts
My parents basically said “If you keep getting bullied, assault the bully, try to draw blood, and we’ll take you out for ice cream if you get suspended.” Highly recommended for any parents of boys out there - it is the best way to address this problem.
Violence committed for the welfare of man is a virtue.
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A lot of children discover how to deal with bullies effectively. This can be taught to them.
I keep wondering what you think bullying is, at the school level? Because at my level, it was physically violent - and I was not in a school where this was considered "a problem". Everyone knew who the bullies were, and there was a collective culture of silence because the school could not possibly enforce proper physical safety on the grounds or around it. You avoided them and stayed away from them, because they abs…
In the Netherlands there used to be a TV show where victims would explain how being bullied dramatically affected them far into adulthood. At the end of the episode, they'd meet their bully. The consistent pattern across episodes is interesting. Pretty much every time the bully barely (or not at all) remembered the bullying. Not as a type of denial, they were genuinely shocked to learn that they were a bully, or that…
Replace "bullying" with: Parental neglect/abuse, unfair rejection/blame, or being backstabbed in a situation that you can't really do anything about it/no one will believe you. It gets at what the end-feeling is like. Bullying in its raw form seems acutely more harmful than say, parental abuse, which only manifests as "bullying" years later, but it's the same overall kind of pain, and I am amazed at how many people from broken situations who should easily understand have taken a hard stance, and missed the point on bullying. It's not the same as "getting one's ass kicked", because there is no productive lesson to be learned, it's more of a feeling of obvious rejection or being singled out in some way that hijacks the human evaluation system in a highly damaging way, that can stay with you for years - unfairly.
Worth solving: Of course, but who knows how? Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.
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I think you problably have some sampling bias in your adult interactions. Im guessing most of them don't involve the lowest functioning portion of the population, eg, people who regularly comment violence, rape, and beat their wives, or are currently incarcerated. Public schools cut across the entire population spectrum and include children with legitimate social and cognitive deficiencies. Adults also have more deve…
>I think you problably have some sampling bias in your adult interactions. Is there anyone who doesn't have 'sampling bias' in their adult interactions? This seems like a misapplication of a technical term.
"the well adjusted adults I know easily resolve issues without violence" does not mean that you should expect the same results for all adults, or for all children.
My parents basically said “If you keep getting bullied, assault the bully, try to draw blood, and we’ll take you out for ice cream if you get suspended.” Highly recommended for any parents of boys out there - it is the best way to address this problem.
100%. My wife and I are very explicit in our instruction to our son. It’s never “We don’t hit”; it’s always presented with context. Violence committed for the welfare of man is a virtue.
“We don’t hit girls” was an unqualified demand, though.
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There's a term for this: Victim Blaming. It's one thing to not be so sensitive when it comes to jokes or teasing, but this requires a maturity that a child does not yet have. A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were (I know I'm treading very close to a No True Scotsman with that statement). I was bullied when…
If there was something that you could have done yourself to prevent or stop it, would you refuse to do it? If there are skills that could be taught to children to prevent their own bullying, would you deny them?
I still don't know.
"Do you go Ender's Game on the bully?" As an adult, I don't want to condone violence, but at some point, it seems like there must come a point where one must stand up & defend oneself. The problem is that you'll very likely get in trouble for it — self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators. (Aside from Ender's Game, there are some good episodes of SG:SG1 that touch on this topic. It is complex even for adults. The permissibility of violence in this situation is likely conditional on authority figures having turned a blind eye to the situation. The level of nuance here probably exceeds what I'd expect a child being bullied to be able to command. The other problem is that bullies don't always operate alone, and a fight one decides to pick might not be a fair one.)
But like I said, it's besides the point: to a degree, yeah, you should teach children to have a "thick skin". But "thick skin" only gets the child so far: it can fend off mild amounts of verbal abuse, but I do not think a child can be effectively taught to deal with repeated, long-term verbal abuse, social ostracization, and physical abuse, and to deal with the emotional consequences thereof. At that stage, bullying is a failure of adults to discipline, in so much as it is allowed to happen and moreso and in particular, to persist.
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I keep wondering what you think bullying is, at the school level? Because at my level, it was physically violent - and I was not in a school where this was considered "a problem". Everyone knew who the bullies were, and there was a collective culture of silence because the school could not possibly enforce proper physical safety on the grounds or around it. You avoided them and stayed away from them, because they abs…
A panopticon of surveillance? That’s absurd. Anyway, a lot of bullying actually happens online these days. It can be much more effective than physical bullying.
We cant even manage the latter a dedicated judicial system.
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We're strongly considering homeschooling our kid. We have reservations (read are scared of how hard it sounds compared to sending them off to school) but hearing about experiences like this move us in that direction. It sounds like a best of both worlds. Avoid bullies and other bs associated with institutional education and instead have a customized, curiosity driven education.
...and also to keep the kid in an associal bubble. Socialisation and experiencing/handling all kinds of people in life is the most important skill to be learned in school. I woulnt want to give this up for comfort.
As someone who was bullied at school, let me assure you, the only socialisation I received from the experience, was an appreciation for how fucking horrible humans can be.
In the Netherlands there used to be a TV show where victims would explain how being bullied dramatically affected them far into adulthood. At the end of the episode, they'd meet their bully. The consistent pattern across episodes is interesting. Pretty much every time the bully barely (or not at all) remembered the bullying. Not as a type of denial, they were genuinely shocked to learn that they were a bully, or that…
There are many adult bullies, and while I'm not sure if they were also bullies when they were kids it's certainly not the case that it's necessarily a temporary stage of someone's development. Adult bullies tend to operate quite differently, though, and can be much smarter about plausible deniability.