Tentatively seconding that opinion. To be a bully, in my mind, you pick on those you feel don’t have the means to defend themselves, and justify it in your mind with some pseudo-scientific crap. ‘Dr.’ Bully isn’t just a thug who likes fighting, else he’d be doing it with people his own size - picking on someone much smaller or weaker pretty much guarantees the fight won’t last very long.
I tend to think these self-certified psychoanalysts are just covering for their own faults by highlighting those of other people, in the only way they know which will give quick results; intimidation and ridicule. If they really wanted to cover their own faults they’d put the work in to fix them, through self-actualisation, which is more sustainable and healthier than repeatedly bullying others when they’re feeling low.
You can think what you want and try to redefne words to narrowly fit what you want them to mean, it costs me nothing for you to do those things. I’ve been working with middle and high school kids for nearly thirty years. That includes sorting out their bullying issues, or trying to. Your ideas about bullying do not fit the facts as I have observed them over three decades, thousands of kids, and three school districts. Nor do they fit the facts as I have observed them among adults, for that matter.
Badly. And I was targeted for the same reason everyone else is - I presented myself as a victim. I did not have much self-confidence and I wouldn’t stand up for myself.
Since then, I have learned differently. The fact that I was bullied is probably the reason I got into martial arts. I learned self-confidence and how to not present myself as a victim. I now teach that to others and I help kids not be bullied today.
Then you are using the word improperly. Calling out someone on their BS or putting them in their place when out of line is not “bullying”, even if done roughly or bluntly. Bullying is abusively picking on the weaker, and is immoral.
Objectively speaking, no, there is no shame in attending a social skills class. But in practice, there would be plenty of shaming. Kids are already stigmitized when they require extra academic help. I doubt there would be a lot of kids lining up to get help with social stuff. At least not in a public school setting where nothing is secret.
I wasn’t the coolest kid in the world, but that actually isn’t the proximate cause for why I got harrassed in school. I got teased because I talked and moved “funny”, but had the audacity to act like I was just like everyone else. Eventually being teased for being a “retard” made me rather disinterested in putting my social skills to good use, but it isn’t as though I didn’t have them. It seems to me that the other kids that got harassed also had things about them that made them stick out in a “bad” way that no amount of social skills training would have fixed. Like, there was this one girl that got the buisness because her mother made her dress like Nelly Olson. She didn’t act like Nelly Olson, though. If anyone needed an intervention, it was her mother and the religious dogma that set her children apart from everyone else.
Unless the social skills training would teach kids how to overcome the hassles of being in “wrong” religion, social class, race/ethnicity, and body, I don’t know if they would do any good.
I am hoping that one day I get picked for a jury on a case where someone couldn’t take it anymore and mortally harmed their bully. I will do my best to convince the all attorneys that I can be fair and impartial. And then I will be the juror that holds out for acquittal.
I was a bully and after some careful reflection as an adult, I realized that I was picking on people not because they were loners or were awkward, but because they were those things and oblivious. If you’re an awkward, loner type who didn’t pay the proper playground respects to your “better” that’s when the bully urge rose for me. I had no ill will towards kids who knew their station and played their part.
There were lots of truly sad and lonely children in my classes and I would genuinely feel bad for them.
I remember one kid who was developmentally delayed, and came from a horrendous home life. He was generally ignored by the class until one day he came to school with his dog who he’d painted various colours. The student body went apeshit on him, never letting him feel safe in the class again. The memory still bothers me. He never did suffer by me, before or after the dog incident, because I could see he was genuinely in trouble.
First, I’m a believer in that there’s some sort of thing about kids that brands them victims. I guess Whiskey Dickens finally gave me a little insight because I always believed I was just as good as everybody else, despite being the kid that didn’t fit in. The popular girls definitely made it their business to try and knock me down, physically and emotionally. I guess the “acting outside of my station” thing could’ve really been the reason why (I’d never considered it before).
The problem with a social skills class to help “make friends” is it doesn’t work like that. First, everyone can tell when you’re only faking interest in something to make friends and you get shunned anyway. And second, most kids who are bullied aren’t socially awkward to any extreme extent that requires intervention, they just have interests or activities outside the “norm”. A class like that would often degrade into, “Look Billy, if you want people to stop picking on you, you have to stop talking about Yu-Gi-Oh cards, because everyone else thinks it’s dumb. You need to start liking soccer, because all the other boys like soccer.” We have a culture that strongly believes in people should be free to be who they are, and a class like that would go entirely against the grain. It’s no wonder people reacted strongly against it.
This is an important thing to note. Bullies target isolated individuals that they can corral and control. A weak person who would normally be a bully’s target who also has a support group, a halo of friends around them, will not be the target.
Why? Because a person with even a tenuous support group around them means that the bully is not targeting an individual, he/she is targeting a group.
Separation from a support group allows the bully actions. Inclusion in any kind of emotional or physical back-up group stops the bully, and isolates the bully instead.
It’s kind of a self-perpetuating thing, too. If a person is friendless and a bully starts in, it makes it harder for the victim to make friends because other people don’t want to get involved and possibly be targeted too. For me, it was the complete indifference by everyone else that hurt more than the bullies themselves.
I have a couple of relatives on the autism spectrum who have attended social skills classes as part of their education. It’s not so much about making specific friends as it is about how to behave in such as way that they can go out in public without making a big scene. Lots of people say, “But isn’t it the parents’ job to teach that?” and to some degree, yes, it is, but these kids need some extra help.
My old neighbor’s boyfriend (they are both in their 50s) is autistic, and was not officially diagnosed until a few years ago. He’s really into collecting certain items, and has gotten into trouble at work more than once for buttonholing co-workers and talking to them about his collection.
For me, as a tween I had multiple instances of kids making fun of me in public who had never seen me before - we’re talking about things like going to a carnival in the town where my grandmother lived, and they did this. :eek: :mad: Naturally, I was accused of doing things to those kids because I wanted to embarrass my parents, who always viewed my school issues the same way and therefore did not intervene, even when kids did things like make ugly scenes at band concerts.
As a part of psychotherapy, I have received some social skills remediation.
But thing is, my weaknesses only appear in one-on-one interaction. They aren’t the kind of things that can be fixed by a class, unless there are units on “How to detect when someone’s pulling your leg” and “How to fake-laugh convincingly at unfunny jokes”. I didn’t know I was weak in these areas until I was a grown-ass adult and had been working with a trained therapist for six years. How would I have known as a kid?
Social skills training would only help kids with very pronounced impairments. Like the kid who never waits his turn or the kid who talks obsessively about train schedules. But most kids with weak social skills don’t need help with the broad strokes. They need help with the subtle stuff–the stuff that won’t be on the teacher’s radar unless he or she spends hours working on-on-on with them.
I think you misunderstood. I never called anyone out on their BS specifically, I flat out harassed and picked fights with them, often on a daily basis. Bullying has nothing to do with weakness, their position/title…etc does. Your boss could bully you, someone in political power could bully you, someone over the internet can bully you as could your own spouse or family member. You can be both physically or mentally abused…it’s far more than just someone picking on you because your a little guy or too shy.
Certain personality types just bring out the rage in me. I can only assume most bully’s are the same way, targeting someone because there is that something about them that just makes them want to target them. Also fighting back does not always stop bullying, in fact it makes matters worse…that’s why I’ve been to jail a couple of times over it
which is why I said it would be voluntary. Actually, I thought both the meeting for the bullies and the victims should be out of school and off-site to protect kids’ privacy.
I dunno. I went to school with a kid who have pretty serious CP, and was pretty popular. He had good social skills. There was another kid who was just a little klutzy, and got teased endlessly. The kid with CP had good social skills. The klutzy kid, now that I think back, probably had Asperger’s syndrome, and one of his obsessions was sports. He knew statistics back and forwards, and would play games at recess, besides playing them badly would stop in the middle to recite the history of some play. Personally, I didn’t do sports much, so I was only tangentially aware at the time of how he annoyed people, but the kid with CP got chosen for teams before he did.
Also, there was a kid in my middle school who was seriously overweight, but popular, and never got teased. Meanwhile, there was a kid who was unpopular, and slightly chubby, and got teased for being “fat.” Guess which one had good social skills.
Yeah, teachers shouldn’t be conducting these classes. Teachers do say things like that.
But some people do need to be taught how to “read” when another person isn’t interested in what they are talking about. There’s nothing wrong about liking Yu-Gi-Oh cards. There is something wrong about talking about them incessantly to someone who couldn’t care less and wishes to gawd you’d just shut up. You don’t have to like soccer, but sometimes you have to listen to other people’s interests as well.
I’m not an expert on this, but we had something like this for adults with high-functioning autism, and I can’t tell you how many people said they wished someone had had something like this for them when they were young. They might have fared a lot better in school. It was designed by behavior psychologists who worked on it for several years, and administered by MSWs. People who qualified for it had to have some kind of diagnosis, and insurance paid for it. I sat in on a few sessions, and it was fascinating. I’m sure someone has adapted a version for children. Among other things, it’s a short course in human psychology. The do a lot of role-playing, but they never tell people you must do X, they just give people clear information, the sort of information that most people just pick up through observation or osmosis, or whatever, but some people, for whatever reason, don’t, and then are lost in social situations. Once people had the information, they could make choices they weren’t able to make before.
And I’m saying I seriously doubt kids will volunteer for a social skills class. It would end up being yet another thing kids are forced to go to. The kids who would respond favorably to it would be those kids who already recognize they have weaknesses and really want to change. Which would be a small minority. Most people–even children–think their social skills are adequate. And there’s a fine line between correcting socially inappropriate behaviors and squashing harmless eccentricities and personality quirks that the cool kids find “lame”.
He also had a formal diagnosis. Even bullies consider it gauche to go after a kid that everyone knows has a condition.
But I didn’t have a fancy medical label to protect me. In the eyes of everyone, including my own parents, I was a klutz because that’s what I had chosen to be. I drooled when I talked because I wanted to look like a spaz. I guess you’re lucky to not know anyone who has ever been in this kind of situation.
There’s a chicken-egg thing to think about. Do the bullied get teased because they have poor social skills? Or do they only appear to have poor social skills because no one ever gives them a freakin’ chance to be social? Robbie was the new kid in my second grade class. On his very first day, he made the mistake of passing gas and after that he was the “fart boy”. He tried to play with the other boys on the playground, but they always rejected him. It’s like he could never escape the embarrassment of that first day or the horrible fact that he was “new”. I think I was the only kid who befriended him that entire year. (He introduced me to Mr. Spock’s hand signal. That was our “thing”.) I’m sure an outsider looking in would have seen a little boy who wasn’t trying hard enough to be cool. But that’s not true at all. I seriously don’t know what social skills training would have done for him, because it wasn’t him that had the problem.
I had lousy social skills as a kid, but I had an older cousin who looked out for me, and clued me in when I was doing the kind of things that would get me ostracized. I didn’t become a conformist, and my cousin isn’t one either (albeit, I’m odder than she is).
If it weren’t for my cousin, I would have been the kid who reminded the Hebrew teacher that we were supposed to have a quiz. Seriously. With my cousin’s help, I could still do that, but I could realize it had social ramifications, whether I liked it or not; with that information, I could make a choice, rather than stumbling into something.
My cousin is something of a social skills savant. She’s a doctor who is known for her outstanding bedside manner (or so I hear; I don’t live in the same city she does). I have no trouble believing it, given what she was like as a child and an adolescent. We were practically raised as sisters, so I think a lot of it is inborn, I really do. I’m lucky she looked out for me.
On the one hand… I wasn’t one of those kids who continued to bounce enthusiastically up to the other kids expecting them to find me interesting and funny and friendworthy. After awhile I definitely Got It and expected the reactions of other kids to be hostile and belittling and, since I didn’t find that at all pleasant, stopped reaching out to them and kept to myself. And meanwhile, my main theory is that I had a specific set of behaviors and traits that isolated me, rather than it being a set of bad or underdeveloped social skills: I identified with the girls and modeled myself after them. First it only isolated me from the boys (many of whom bullied me) but around 10 years old I also had a lot of trouble making girl friends too. Girls were less inclined to bully me but it did mean that I didn’t have any supportive group to counterbalance or insulate me.
On the other hand… after awhile, that much isolation meant I wasn’t continuing to develop social skills. And depending on how the “classes” were set up, it might have been a good thing. Especially if it wasn’t all geared towards “you are unpopular because of deficiencies on your own part” but rather included “you are unpopular because of ways in which you are different that aren’t accepted by the other kids” and gave me more opportunity to talk about that and strategize about what to do about it aside from resent it —including techniques for dealing with bullying.
Informally, I got a bit of both and I was sturdy enough to take what I could use and cope with the rest (the attempts to normalize me or make me feel remiss in not fitting in better) the same way I coped with bullying from the kids.
When I was in high school, my mother in particular constantly advised me to be “friendly” and didn’t seem to understand that friendliness is a two-way street, and that there’s no point in being friendly if the other person isn’t interested.
She finally saw the results for herself, and gave up on that tactic. It wasn’t until my early 20s that I realized that the adult world is full of people with diverse interests, and some of the might even like to share them with me if I made myself available. In between, in that 18-22 age range, it seemed that everyone I met was only interested in two things: drinking, and prejudice against black people. :mad: I half expected the former, but not the latter.
By bully do you mean an actual bully, or just more senior pupils who have the traditional privilege of ordering their juniors to perform menial tasks for them?
Not as part of the class, but something I got to observe was “social skills for Asperger’s and high-functioning autism.” They had some volunteer “normal” kids (they were scouts who were doing it as part of a scouting project) who were paired off with the autistic kids, and told to give honest reactions, and help the instructors gently critique (I assume they had had a training session before this). Anyway, one thing the kids were told was that anything could be a topic for conversation, including their special interests, but what turned people off was lecturing them.
They told the kids
Establish this is a shared interest (eg, if it’s sports, ask a question like “Did you see the ball game last night?” or “Do you play on a team in school?”
If the answer is yes, talk about one particular thing that happened in the game, or ask more about their team.
If it’s no, ask what they do with their free time, or ask what did do instead of watching the game.
Give them plenty of time to respond, and wait for them to ask a question. Even if it’s a yes or no question, offer some extra information.
The adult presenters walked around and observed the practice conversation. Kids with an especially bad problem with rambling on and on had stop watches so they could only talk for 45 seconds per turn.
They did some team-building exercises, where they were in groups of five or six, and had to solve a problem as a group. The adults walked around to make sure no on person was dominating each group.
They played games, where they went around a circle, clapping to keep a rhythm, and as they went around the circle, each on said a sentence, then the next one had to say a new sentence using one (and only one) word from the previous person’s sentence. If they screwed up their sentence, or lost they rhythm, they were “out.” Sessions lasted an hour and usually were three quarter sessions consisting of two skills building activities, and one 5-minute break, while the last one was an activity, round table conversation, then some singing, and good-byes.
That’s the sort of thing I’m envisioning, but maybe scaled up just a little for kids who are not autistic, just have poor social skills. They could probably eliminate a lot of things, like practicing identifying facial expressions.
:mad: I half expected the former, but not the latter.