Tips On Helping Your Kids With Bullying | The Mummy Whisperer Blog

It’s hard enough to have felt bullied or to feel bullied, but it is even harder as a Mum to see your children become bullies or be bullied.

My stuff below might be at times difficult to get your head around, but I promise you that it works.

I’ve used it on myself and my past, where I felt that I was bullied all the way through school, and I have used it on my present day when I find myself being bullied by someone with a stronger nature than me. Plus I use it will my children, especially my son Curly Headed Boy, who pretty much faced bullying from very young, but isn’t at all worried or bothered by it now a days.

This page is a great place to come back to when you want a summary of everything I’ve written and to get an overview to start with.

List of the original posts I wrote ‘back in the day’
Summary of the Concepts discussed
Summary of the Strategies to Employ
For all of the posts about bullying, click on the category for bullying.

I’m very chuffed to have been selected as one of the Top 100 blogs helping people with bullying for 2013 by NoBullying.com

Original Posts

Here are the titles of my blogs to date (but bear in mind that there might be more and I might forget to add them to the list!):

Bullying Pt1 – Always there

Bullying Pt 2 – Where Does Bullying Come From?

Bullying Pt 3 – Balance at Home?

Bullying Pt 4 – We Can’t Be Liked By Everyone

Bullying Pt 5 – Is there too much Like in your life?

Bullying Pt 6 – Do we really want to get rid of Bullying?

Bullying Pt7 – What is ‘Support’ and ‘Challenge’

Bullying Pt 8 – Why Bully?

Bullying Pt9 – Everyone Is a Bully

Bullying Pt10 – What on Earth could be the benefits?

Bullying Pt11 – More Insights into the Bully

Bullying Pt12 – The Bully Returns For My son

Bullying Pt13 – Ideas on Strategies to Empower your Kids

Bullying Summary of the Concepts

Summary Of Strategies To Employ

I’ve been blogging about bullying for ages, but it’s a complicated subject and I realised that you might be needing a quick summary on how to start tackling the issue. Please bear in mind that you will probably need to read my other blogs to get the background situation and examples.

So this is a ‘quick’ summary. With the proviso, that it is ‘quick’, not thorough, and there are different degrees of bullying, some of which are quickly resolved and some of which you might need some assistance with.

Step 1 – Deal with your issues first so you can be objective

This is an emotional subject and you are likely to either be upset because you are remembering what it was like to be bullied yourself, feeling terribly protective, or really mortified because you feel guilty that your child has been doing the bullying. So in order for you to deal with this, you first need to be able to see the situation clearly and not take your own baggage into the situation.

Step 2 – Stand back and have a look at the Support/Challenge balance in their life

If your child is being ‘bullied’, where is the support/ease/life going the way they like it? Where are they ‘popular’? Where are they getting their own way? Are they ‘over-protected’ somewhere?
If you child is the ‘bully’, where is the challenge/difficulty/unease in their lives? Are they feeling insecure, lacking in power, bored, or needing more freedom?

Step 3 – What are they getting from it on both sides?

What is your ‘bullied’ child getting from being bullied? Why do their so called ‘persecutors’ need to do it?
What is your ‘bullying’ child getting from the bullying? What are their so called ‘victims’ getting from it?
What do they all need to learn?
What is it directing them to do or not do?

Step 4 – Devise a strategy

1) Where can you help to re-balance the support/challenge in your child’s life? Does the bully need something to give them more security, or more clear guidelines/boundaries, or for a parent to back off, or for a parent to stand up for themselves more?

Does the bullied child need more responsibility at home, less spoiling, or more consistency and rules.

2) Help your child learn directly, what they have been learning indirectly.

Now my son is nearly 4, so I can have chats with him, but I also need to use things like role playing with puppets to get the point across. If your child doesn’t understand chats, then you might want to look for a media that they will understand for example a story/book/film/TV program that will initiate a conversation. If they are bullying they may need to understand the consequences of their actions, either with a form of punishment or a look at how it will affect them detrimentally in the future. How can you teach them the social interaction lessons that they are learning from the episodes?

3) Involve the school

Just because I don’t think that bullies are bad kids, doesn’t mean that I don’t think that the school should get involved. I don’t think that vilifying the bullies will help, or rescuing the bullied. However, clear signals an rules as to what is expected and allowed in behaviour at school is definitely necessary.

4) Create a plan of action & monitor it

Remember you can’t remove bullying from your child’s life, but you can rejig where it displays. So create a plan of action, and then monitor it over a period of time to see where it is and isn’t working. Get in touch with me on my fan page or via my website if you require any assistance.

Summary Of Concepts

I thought it might be useful to summarise all the concepts that I have covered in my Bullying Blogs for you guys.

(See my other blogs for the background information for these, you’ll probably need explanations to explain why these concepts work):

1) Labels are not useful and don’t fix anything. In fact in some way everyone is a Bully, just as much as each other; it’s just that the majority of us do it in subtle or more socially acceptable ways.

2) Bullying can not be destroyed as it is a part of human nature, so trying to remove it is naive and will just move it to more subtle or difficult places to monitor; that doesn’t mean that it can’t be dealt with though. It is therefore in all of our lives, the problem is when it is in a place or focussed so strongly that it causes distress or when the parents don’t know about it.

3) The objective instead is to understand the bullying and learn from it, so that it becomes something our kids don’t notice or that just goes over their heads.

4) A child who is being bullied will be being overly supported / protected / liked somewhere in their lives. There is always a balance in our lives (although it’s often not easy to see) of ease/difficulty and support/challenge. It can help with the resolution of the problem to look at the other side of the picture.

5) Everyone is both liked and disliked to an equal degree, it is impossible to be liked by everyone, but also more comfortingly we will never be disliked by everyone either!

6) The ‘bullied’ child will gain benefits from being bullied (the silver-lining), and if we can help them understand, appreciate and learn from this and the concepts above, then they do not need to feel victimised & powerless.

7) The ‘bullying’ child also requires some assistance (although I’m not against consequences and punishment either), as the reason that they are ‘bullying’ is to gain a supportive/enjoyable experience in order to deal with something else in their lives that they are finding challenging or because they need someone to put their foot down and give them boundaries that are lacking elsewhere.

8) An example of what the ‘Bullied’ child can gain from the experience is to learn to stand up for themselves, or to mix with other children who might be a ‘better influence’ or more suitable for them.

9) An example of why a ‘Bullying’ child does it, is because they need Power, Freedom, Belonging or Fun, i.e. they feel powerless at home due to under-dominating parents, or have lack of choice due to dominating parents, or are insecure about belong loved or belonging, or are bored.

10) The ‘Bully’ is not ‘horrid’ or ‘evil’ and the ‘Bullied’ is not an ‘angel’. Thinking of them like that will cloud the issues and stop them from being resolved, which is the most important thing.

Now, if any of this pushes some buttons (and I would totally understand if it does, as bullying is a very emotional subject), please read my other blogs before jumping to conclusions. I’m not just saying all this for no apparent reason and with no background. It has come from 10yrs of studying, a 40yr lifetime of experience, plus being a Mum myself. So bear with me, I’m attempting to help us all resolve the growing problems of bullying in the UK.