How Parents Can Talk To Their Children About Bullying

5 Steps Talking With Your Kids About Bullying, Bullies, Harassment & Being Tormented

Bullying Is Serious - But There are Bullying Solutions
Bullying can be a painful experience and if the bullying situation is left untreated, it can have significant detrimental effects for a child.  Here are five tips to open a dialog with your child to discuss bullying and how they can prevent bullying behavior towards themselves or others.

Different Kinds of Bullying

Source: http://library.thinkquest.org/07aug/00117/typesbullying.html

1. Physical bullying 

In elementary and middle schools, 30.5% of all bullying is physical.

2. Verbal bullying is name-calling, making offensive remarks, or joking about a person's religion, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or the way they look. 46.5% of all bullying in schools is the verbal type. Verbal aggression is when a bully teases someone. It can also include a bully making verbal threats of violence or aggression against someone's personal property.

3. Indirect bullying includes spreading rumors or stories about someone, telling others about something that was told to you in private, and excluding others from groups.  Indirect bullying accounts for 18.5% of all bullying.

4. Social alienation is when a bully excludes someone from a group on purpose. It also includes a bully spreading rumors, and also making fun of someone by pointing out their differences.

5. Intimidation is when a bully threatens someone else and frightens that person enough to make him or her do what the bully wants.

6. Cyberbullying is done by sending messages, pictures, or information using electronic media, computers (email & instant messages), or cell phones (text messaging & voicemail). For instance, if you sent a picture of a snake in an email to a person because you know that they are afraid of snakes, that would be an example of cyberbullying. According to a survey done in 2003 only 4% of bullying is listed as "other types" and this would include cyberbullying. Even though this number seems small, the growth of this type of bullying is going up fast because of the spread of technology around the world.*

Bullying, Harassment, Violence, Hitting, Kicking, Pinching, Punching, Slapping, Tripping, Shoving, Isolating, Name-calling, hurtful words, insults, exclusion, rumors,

The first step is learning a little bit about youth violence, cyber bullying and other forms of harassment.  You can find lots of resources online or at the Arizona Bully Proof Training blog.  Remember that there are different types of bullying.

The next step is sharing with your child about your experiences as a child and emphasizing how it made you feel.  This can be a great way to open the door to allow your child to express his or her feelings with you.

1. Open dialog: communicate hope and perspective so they learn that it is safe, good and smart to learn to ask for help and guidance. "Never keep quiet about bullying.  Your silence is the bullies strength."
2. Listen without judgment so they feel safe talking to you and other authority figures who can help
3. Teach empathy so they can become self aware and improve emotional intelligence
4. Play "what if" so they can make positive safety choices
5. Encourage noble behavior so they will step in, step up and help others being bullied

We would like to invite you to consider taking martial arts with your child with our amazing family program.  You will build lots of magical memories and have quality time doing something healthy, fun and learning a skill.

Families Who Kick Together Stick Together!

* Source: http://library.thinkquest.org/07aug/00117/typesbullying.html