Bust Bullying with Bully Reistant Optimism Skills

Sept. 30, 2010 - PRLog -- Now that we are a month into the school year, “bullying” is a hot topic and news item.  With all the attention that bullying in schools has received in the last ten years, I find myself naively thinking it should have gone away by now.  But no, it keeps raising its ugly monstrous head.

Just this week, we were hit with the tragic news that a 13 year old middle school boy from California had committed suicide over relentless bullying in school.  As National Bully Awareness Month begins next week, October 2010, I plan to have more to say about the subject.  But I thought I would start with this re-written post of my article from the 2009 National Bullying Awareness Week.



Seven Tips for Schools and Families to Teach BULLY RESILIENT OPTIMISM

1.    The first core ingredient of BULLY RESILIENT OPTIMISM is Learned Helpfulness which is the OPPOSITE of Learned Helplessness.  Learned Helpfulness means the child knows and uses strategies to decrease, deescalate or stop the bullying by  helping him or herself or getting help from friends, family,  and adults.  

2.    The second core ingredient is to teach children that the bully is in THE WRONG, and that however intimidated, threatened or  “in the wrong they may feel” as the bully taunts and makes fun, they are in the right.   Normalize without condoning the bullying by saying 90 % of children are bullied and it is the bully that is in the wrong.  

3.    Do start discussing what a bully is and what bullies do, as early as 2nd grade.  Make it an ongoing discussion and dialogue several times a year and more as appropriate through the 8th grade. Do let the child know that if he/she sees or experiences bullying behavior to come and talk to you about it.  Make sure the school is having similar discussions with kids.    Teach your child to be the mediator who takes a leadership role to intervene in a peer group to stop the bullying incident.

4.    Sometimes the public focus and emphasis to stop bullying can have the opposite of the intended impact.  That is bullies do not learn to stop bullying, but instead learn how to be cleverer about it by avoiding overt bully acts when adults are watching or moving to cyber-space bullying.  Thus, the amount and frequency of bulling has not changed much since the 1950’s, but the venues have.

5. Our educational efforts need to include the bullies themselves with a focus on creating a sense of social consciousness and guilt.  Imagine a middle school culture where peer approval was most sought for helping and including the "little guy," "the one who is seen as different," "the less fortunate and downtrodden," instead of being seen as "king of the hill or mountain."  Rather than joining in with the bully behavior, friends can be taught to intervene to stop the behavior without being seen as part of the "school police."    

5.    Teach non-aggressive BULLYING SELF-DEFENSE SKILLS: Including verbal self-assertiveness, humorous deflection, non-violent friend recruitment skills, “show-no-fear-skills," and “animal posturing.”  Before an animal actually fights it usually postures an aggressive response to de-escalate the fight by growling, leering, puffing out the chest.  Such human versions of the posturing can be taught to children as a strategy for getting the bully to back-off.

6.    Engage children in positive after school activity structures such as sports, Cub Scouts, Brownies, Girl and Boy Scouts.  Such adult supervised, positive activity structures  decrease the opportunity for bullying to occur.

7.     Bottom line: We need to  teach the child a complex set of non-aggressive, assertive, help recruitment, de-escalating social skills that maintain self-esteem while stopping the bully.

To read more go to: http://www.drrussbuss.com/optimism-blog/2010/9/30/stop-th...

# # #

About Moment to Moment: Our mission is to teach "skilled optimism"- how let go of a negative in a moment; view life as one continuous learning curve with multiple "do-over" opportunities. Products include a daily blog, seminars, publications, speaking, radio show, & coaching. http://www.drrussbuss.com