Not all of you. It’s simply not possible that every single person I know was “bullied”. It’s possible that everyone felt fragile, and it’s possible that everyone has met a bully.
In any event, watch, enjoy, and most of all take 3 seconds and hit the subscribe button on my channel so we can continue the discussion.
Do you agree? Disagree? When we tell this many kids that they’ve been bullied does it take away from the seriousness of the situation? I do want to hear your thoughts on this one.
I think everyone has run across someone, at some stage of life, who’s tried to intimidate them. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we finally recognize that the behavior isn’t some sort of mile marker of development that we should just grimace and bear.
I loathed bully awareness crap when I was teaching. The only thing that ever worked in situations where kids were being picked on was tattling and swift adult administered justice. I also counseled kids to stand up for themselves but to let me or another adult know if things got beyond their ability to ignore or defend themselves against. You never know when a situation is just kids being kids or something darker.
I was physically attacked by an older neighborhood boy, whose bullying I ignored forl years. That is what adults expected of us back in the day. I never let the guy get to me and I defended younger kids from him and he eventually jumped me. He was 15 and I was 12. Had my brother not been there, I’d have been badly hurt or worse. It wasn’t until I came home and my parents saw the welts on my neck from where he’d tried to strangle me that I told them what had been going on and Dad had a talk with his parents. And it stopped. The boy in question grew up and frequented the local police beat with his spousal abuse arrests. Went through at least two wives. Don’t know if the third stayed with him or not.
Anyway, there is merit to your argument, but there are exceptions. I suppose the over-use of the word bully is a backlash from the days when kids were expected to do all the fending for themselves and if everyone wasn’t bullied badly, they know someone who was.
I wasn’t bullied. Sure, I encountered a few mean people, but like you, I see bullying as an ongoing harassment by one person or a group of people. I guess it never really occurred to me that people would view a one time instance as bullying. Seems to me that it could incite a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” situation. Then again, I would hope that schools would take all incidents seriously, not just the ones that have continuous complaints. It should be dealt with swiftly the first time. These schools boast zero tolerance policies and I’ve heard story after story where situations were not handled properly, if at all.
I was. And it was of that level of seriousness that I’m actually not going to listen to the video just because there are serious triggers.
I’m sorry I can’t join this conversation. I think it’s an important one. But some of us barely made it out alive.
And DISQUS is back….
We don’t have a definition of bullying. We just have a general sort of discussion where someone says that they were picked on. For the sake of the discussion I’ll say that it is physical/verbal intimidation that happens repeatedly and in situations where the target is unable to easily escape.
My kids’ school has a similar program to the one you described. They don’t have fist fights there and they aare very aware of who gets picked on so that usually doesn’t last. I find that semi-troubling.
Part of me likes it, but at the same time it is not reality. I am a big believer in teaching kids how to deal with the real world and this bubble is problematic.
Doesn’t mean that I want them to have their self esteem destroyed either, but the lack of balance sometimes….
And DISQUS is back….
We don’t have a definition of bullying. We just have a general sort of discussion where someone says that they were picked on. For the sake of the discussion I’ll say that it is physical/verbal intimidation that happens repeatedly and in situations where the target is unable to easily escape.
My kids’ school has a similar program to the one you described. They don’t have fist fights there and they aare very aware of who gets picked on so that usually doesn’t last. I find that semi-troubling.
Part of me likes it, but at the same time it is not reality. I am a big believer in teaching kids how to deal with the real world and this bubble is problematic.
Doesn’t mean that I want them to have their self esteem destroyed either, but the lack of balance sometimes….
I wasn’t bullied either. Someone TRIED to bully me b/c I was a fat kid with a penchant for science & carried a violin. But after turning the cheek enough times…I hit them back pretty hard & I was no longer a target.
A-fucking-men.
Teach your kids to hit back, not first, but to defend themselves. I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I’m so glad you said it, goddammit!
There’s something to be said for hitting back. I was the poor fat girl from the “broken home” and I let the intimidation and name calling get to me. Then one day I got mad and broke the nose of the “toughest” girl in school. Everyone left me alone after that. :-)
I was bullied. Or as I think of it, tormented. I wholeheartedly agree with what you’ve said. If it had been one incident or it hadn’t hurt me to the core, it wouldn’t have been bullying. Calling every act of teasing bullying belittles the real problems and makes victims out of kids who aren’t victims.
My friend and I were just talking about this this morning. She’s trying to teach her daughter that no, just because that other kid said that doesn’t mean you were bullied, it just means she said something mean. My younger child’s filter needs help and in his pursuit of telling people what he thinks, in this current climate, I’m afraid he may get labeled as a bully. Right now we’re lucky and in our smallish community most people know he’s just quirky. I liked your post, thanks for sharing.
I was bullied to a degree as a teenager. I was told to go away and that I was stupid. The girls rolled they eyes at me more times than I care to count. The boys and girls would steal things from me. I can still here their whispers about my hair and acne behind my back.I remember how I felt during those days and what I did to counter-act it. Some things positive, some things negative. That’s why I decided to start a blog about what I went through as a teenager in hopes of passing along my wisdom to those girls going through the same thing I did.