Please Don't Feed The Bullies

It seems that an epidemic of bullying has suddenly descended on our children the likes of which the world has never seen. Not a day passes that we don’t hear multiple news reports about the latest bully attack. Kids are committing suicide. Mental health professionals camp on cots outside network news offices, waiting their turn in the never-ending commentary line-up. From Oprah to O’Reilly, everyone wants to solve the problem of bullying, but it seems to be getting worse instead of better.  Why?  Because we're going at it backwards.

We're doing it wrong!
Here's my approach.  Let's start teaching our kids to get over it.  Instead of proudly bestowing victim status on our kids, we should teach them to stand up for themselves.

Oprah would have us teach our kids that the first response to bullying is to go tell the school officials. This approach is symptomatic of our larger attitude toward self-reliance. We are slowly raising a nation of helpless victims whose first response to any problem is to go to find an authority figure to take care of us. If we think we can protect our children from bullies from the top down, we are fooling ourselves. Programs and policies can play a role, but until our kids learn to fend for themselves, the problem will only get worse. Obligatory disclaimer: Of course, students should know that they can ask teachers for help when needed, just as we know we can call the police when needed. But calling the police should not be our first response to most interpersonal disputes. Why would we teach our kids anything different?

Raising victims creates bullies.
I'm no Dr. Phil, but it seems to me that bullies compensate for their own insecurity by dominating and putting down others. They feed on this power like an addictive drug and will continue the behavior as long as their victims will allow it. Adults may be able to temporarily stop them by the power of authority, but the resulting powerlessness only serves to intensify their need to have power over others. Because the driving force behind bullying is the helplessness of the victim, the best way to stop a bully is to empower their victims. When the bully realizes he has no victim, the effect of the drug wears off. He or she may still need counseling and/or punishment to resolve their own inner problems, but this can work only after the detox of removing the source of their power.

Sticks and stones...
As a third grader, I was physically bullied by another boy. I told my dad.  Did he come to the school and have a conference with the principal?  No.  He taught me to stand up for myself, and fight back if necessary.  My dad taught me to fight, literally.  I did fight back, and I gained respect for myself that has given me confidence all my life. As an added bonus, I believe that the bully benefited from the experience as well (although I don't think he realized it at the time). Some say that violence is never the answer, but I beg to differ.  Had I been treated like a weak victim, the bully would have been empowered and my resulting insecurity might well have created another bully in me.  My third grade tormentor and I both learned a powerful lesson that day, a lesson too many of our children will never learn.

It's a complex subject, and there are many problems in our society that contribute to the problem of bullying.  The coarseness of the culture, our glorification of violence, absent fathers, the removal of God as a guiding force in our lives, all these are factors.  But our fundamental shift from raising confident, self-reliant individuals to raising helpless wimps is certainly a major contributor. In an age where “the community” has supplanted the individual, self-reliance is now frowned upon. Therein lies the real problem. When we fail to teach our children to take care of themselves, we teach them to be losers.  And we feed them to the bullies.