I HATE this mother's attitude

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Your advice is just empowering the bullies when you think about it.

You aren't teaching the kid the first thing about the real world, only the world of television sitcoms where magical thinking stands a chance of working. You also teach the kid it's okay to engage the wrong people. I am still not sure what you mean by "stand up for yourself." That can mean anything from telling the bully to shut up to thinking up comebacks to the harassment to punching the bully in the nose all of which do nothing to solve the problem. If a kid hasn't hit another kid and the other kid hits them first, the other kid gets in trouble, that's how the real world works.

What happens when you are an adult in a profession and a coworker starts to bully you? You file a grievance with your boss and if the evidence is there the boss reprimands the coworker. What happens when you get harassed? As an adult you report it to authorities. Taking matters into your own hands is a bad idea because you can get in trouble.

It's best to teach kids what to do and what happens. If they bully, they get in trouble and face the consequences. If they report bullying to proper channels something happens to solve the problem to keep it from escalating.

Just because your opinion is walking away is bad advice doesn't mean it is. Tell me, what's the worse that happens when walking away? The bully looks pretty stupid yelling at someone's back. It's best to walk straight to the teacher in such instances.

How do you know the kid's teacher didn't tell the mother to tell the kid to do that?

Oh, and I have not misrepresented anything you have said because I believe bullying is the equivalent of harassment and assault and should be regarded as such.

We are talking about schoolkids darling, not the office enviroment.
I said to respond in kind, I know that you're still not getting it. Training to kids to run away and get someone else to deal with it is the poorest way to deal it. It teaches them to run away from the problem and pretend it isn't here rather than deal with the problem. Besides filing a grievance with your boss may eventually cause it to stop when the boss gets around to deal with it.

Dealing it with yourself or knowing how to resolve a conflict, is far more valuable than pretending to ignore it. I really don't think you understand how to deal with conflict neither does this mother either. All it is doing is teaching the kid to deal with it by proxy by running off to someone else tom ake them deal with it. This isn't healthy. They need to know how to deal with other people not get someone to deal with it for them.

Last edited by Ashuahhe on 06 Aug 2011, 6:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm trying to remember what my parents told me throughout the years.

They told me to ignore it in the beginning.

It didn't work for me and I see this not working for some autistic kids as well. Whether it could work depends on the child's symptoms and other behaviour as well as the reason for bullying.

Think about how reasons for bullying are as different as types of bullying. A bully's motivation and the course their bullying behaviour might take upon interference is not universal.

- reacting to “normal” teasing and/or bullying by in a way the bully regards as “inappropriate”
- seeking out interaction with the bully in the first place in way the bully thinks is “inappropriate”
- ignoring the bully, possibly including his or her self-appointed position, in a way that the bully judges to be “inappropriate”

(inappropriate meaning here in a way that the just the bully doesn't like or doesn't understand. The same behaviour may still be judged as appropriate by others, it doesn't need to be generally regarded as inappropriate by normal people (=not bullies))

These do not take into consideration
1. the system in which bullying takes place and
2. how it nurtures or even forces it,
3. how people within that system prevent or nurture both intolerance and
4. bullying,

5. whether the bully is encouraged to bully,
6. has a disorder and
7. how they cope or fail to cope with it,
8. what the bully's experiences,
9. priorities or
10. current personal situation are as well as
11. their past experiences with people they knew and now identify with the victim nor does it take into account the

12. victim's abilities and
13. chances granted by the system and people to effectively interfere with the bullying,
14. how the victim involuntarily nurtures or prevents bullying both by their disorder and
15. other behaviour, including
16. their past experiences with people as whole as well as those
17. they might identify with their bully,
18. what the victim's experiences,
19. priorities or
20. current personal situation are,
21 … I'm getting tired of listing all possible major contributing factors involved in bullying.

But back to just those 3 factors, just those will mean that “ignoring it” will have vastly different effects, ranging from effective to worsening the bullying. They may also change the way the victim is assaulted as well as that it can make the bullying more or less attractive.

At worst, bullying can involve everyone that participates in some way in a system such as a school. Who cares to get involved with that if you are not directing in contact with either the bully or the victim? Not a lot of people, but even if they're not in direct contact with bully or victim, they still might have a massive responsible for the bullying. Imagine a principal talking with teachers, few, close parents as well as older students about how they can't stand some minorities or even just don't want them around their school. Saying little things like that encourages a lot of people to more freely show some of their own discomfort with minorities in conversations.


If intolerance, hate and feeling bothered by a disorder are major reasons for the bullying, then I think calls for action. This is my personal opinion now.

In this case, prevention of bullying is number one of the list of actions required to be taken by anyone knowing better and this means educating people about the disorder besides trying to directly interfere with the bullying.

In consequence, this education should have the goal to prompt others to question their discomfort or ignorance towards minorities as a whole and that no person is defective, weak and “worth less” then them for disorders, different backgrounds, having less money or being interested in something else.

Just because person A is now understood and equal, doesn't mean person B is equal too, right? That kind of of thinking is in most people's heads. Don't know why, but it it.

You get them to realise having glasses is an okay-difference, next thing they will point out that people with hearing aids are weird, make them uncomfortable and surely inferior. Or people with AD(H)D are equals, but people with Down's Syndrome are not.

Turning a blind eye to (=ignoring) bullying we are involved in not as the victim or turning a blind eye towards bullying we just notice by chance doesn't exactly change anything for the better. No need to start a huge complain about it and it's not advisable to put yourself in danger to help, but there often is a way to help.

A lot of people making small comments about how people are all equal is what it takes. Massive campaigns or forced changes of opinion often don't last long, because most people don't like to be forced to think or to do something just because authority tells them to. So if “more powerful” people can't do it, it just leaves us ordinary people to strive for the change we desire.

I remember as a kid I would get bullied. I would tell them to leave me alone and walk away. I would even try and ignore it but none of that worked. They would follow me. Okay so I would hit them. I would get in trouble but my mom always found that acceptable what I did. I used words first, I tried walking away and ignoring it but they wouldn't leave me alone so I finally hit them.

The school principal didn't care about bullying but yet she had the rule about respect? She even said I had to toughen up but when I did, I always got in trouble. I wonder if my school principal was a bully herself growing up? She didn't care about invisible disabilities.

But they still bullied me so obviously me kicking their asses didn't work. Maybe because I did it wrong and if I actually hurt them like body slam them or punch them and gave them a black eye or a bloody nose that may have worked. Plus I always got in trouble so that told them bully me, I get in trouble.

As a followup (I had to go to bed)
Ana,
Reporting bullies to the proper channels rarely achieves anything, which seems to by my, and most other people here's experience.
Just walking away toward a teacher doesn't guarantee anything, the bully may stop temporarily, but there's no guarantee the teacher will do anything, more to the point, there's no guarantee the teacher wont join in.

Why do you think it's a good thing that the mother is that disinterested in her childs wellbeing that she'll give a boilerplate response a teacher told her to her daughter?

And you have misrepresented what I've said, because you're redefining words, then using those new definitions without making it understood that that's what you mean, if you're doing it intentionally it means you're being disingenuous


Sora, you made a lot of good points.
It pretty much guarantees that you'll be a target if you're not exactly the same as the other kids.
Teaching the kids that every kid is different in their own way should help, if even a little bit, the problem is getting school administration to focus on doing that properly, there's a lot of inertia to change sadly

League Girl, your situation is exactly what Im talking about, it's far more common than it should be, and applies to real life working situations as well as schools (look at angelrho's post too to get an idea of what Im talking about)
It sucks, and sometimes people in the real world use that system TO bully people.
Half the time, the people in charge go "if they're getting targeted, they MUST be doing something to provoke the other kids. It's just a case of that bully eating humble pie."

My point here is, you cant just say "the only way to solve it is to get someone else to solve it", because the system will never reliably work that way.
However you approach it, trying to befriend them, taunting them back, knocking out a tooth, it shouldn't be escalated until they do.
"He hit me so I hit him back" goes down a lot better than "he was making fun of my glasses so I hit him"

Ana you seem to think that Im saying kids should hit people that make them upset, I'm not, I'm just saying that kids should be taught to have a little pride in themselves, and to stand up for that.
You know, have enough self esteem to know that they dont deserve that sort of treatment, and that they're allowed to respond and put the bully in their place.