Should we teach our kids to hit back?

Great Debates
41

Outside of classroom activities I don’t think I could ever depend on school authorities to prevent physical bullying. Most physical bullying isn’t in the form of fighting but in shoving, a quick slap, or other forms of intimidation and isn’t always easy to spot.

The title of the thread would seem to assume some level of parental involvement.

I don’t want my children to depend on some higher authority to save their asses all the time. What is a parent to do with the school administration isn’t very good? Changing the administration takes a long time and in the menewhile doesn’t help your child in the short term. Most parents can’t afford to take their kids out of school to send them elsewhere.

It’s tough to know what’s minimally necessary when you’re busy being frightened.

If there’s one thing I feared more then a bully in school it was being a tattle-tale. The enormous amount of peer pressure brought to bear against an individual precluded telling teacher the problem. Unless of course you didn’t mind being a social pariah or having the bully redouble his efforts to get you.

And again, if the authorities don’t do anything how is that the parent’s fault? I don’t know about your parents but mind didn’t have any direct control over the teachers and administrators at any of my schools.

Who blamed the kid being picked on?

42

MGibson,

I find it interesting that you think the schools are only responsible for your child’s well-being while they are in the classroom, as opposed to while the kids are in the schools custody.

I’m sorry you didn’t understand “few proponents of the parents getting involved”. I don’t personally qualify telling your kids, “All right we’ll get you some defensive training, then it’s up to you” as being involved. I’m going to assume that you really don’t understand what I meant and lay it out for you. 1) Parents talk to kids to fully understand the situation 2) Parents talk to administrators 3) Parents monitor success of the administrators by polling kids 4) If administrative action is unsatsifactory, parent’s continue up the chain of command. 5) If after going all the way up the chain there is still no satisfactory response, seek civil action. Get an attorney; sue. Yes it takes a lot of effort for the parent. It IS the parent’s responsibility.

So you don’t want your kids to submit to a higher authority all the time (for whatever reason), that’s the seeds of a “mob rule” mentality.

Poor MGibson was afraid of being called a tattle-tale. I feel your pain. Didn’t want to be a social pariah? Who told you you would be? If you shunned fellow kids who did the right thing because it was the right thing when you were a child, shame on you! I personally have no lasting friendships from first grade, or seventh grade, or twelvth grade. . . . What’s more? Who needs those friends? My current friends are just fine thanks.

Who blamed the kids? There were quite a few former “wimps” that said, “If only I had hit back”. There is a subtle difference between, “If only I had stood up for myself” (going through proper channels with parental support) and “if only I had hit back”. These posts are in someways blaming themselves for their passive behavior. At least one mom expressed concern about her passive child. It’s simular to “boy if that girl hadn’t dressed like a slut, she woudn’t have been raped”. If you can’t see that the prevailing attitude is “toughen up”, then I really don’t see any point debating with you.

Finally, I sincerely hope that in real life you actually call the police if you see a situation escalating. Taking the matter into your own hands, while it might be emotionally satisfying, could really expose you to expensive litigation.

43

I’d find it interesting as well if I had actually said that. Based on my experience in school you could never depend on the faculty to ensure that you weren’t physically bullied except in a classroom.

I admit that my comment was something of a joke.

These solutions are all well and good but they’d take to much time to do my child any good. Seeking all these solutions are good ideas but in the menewhile my child is still getting picked on.

Actually it’s the sheep who are willing to submit to authority at all times who are sowing the seeds of mob rule mentality.

Why the fairy godmother of schoolyard rules told me all about tattle-tales, that’s who. Maybe things were a bit different where you went to school. Where I went to school you didn’t go telling the teacher when Billy Bob called you a name or tried to trip you. Telling just made you a bigger target to a wider audience.

I did a lot of things when I was a kid that I regret and feel bad about. Are you so out of touch that you can’t see how important social bonds are to a young person? It’s not so easy for a kid to just think “I won’t be friends with these people in 10 years so I don’t have to worry about what they think.”

I guess I don’t see that as blaming the victim.

It’s a valid concern. While we all want our kids to grow up being good people we don’t want them to be door stops.

In the few situations I’ve had to call the police the action was all over by the time they arrived.

Marc

44

Not necessarily so, Meta-Gumble. It all depends on the attitude of the school, and of the parents. I’ve found that martial arts training (the “right” kind) will make a kid less likely to fight.

My children have practiced Kung Fu since they were seven years old. My son has always been the absolute youngest kid in his class at school (he was born on the cutoff day). He has also always been the smallest kid in his class - by far. Plus, he’s very smart. And he has worn glasses since fourth grade.

You’d think he would have ended up either as a classic victim, or the veteran of many wars. But he has made it through his sophomore year in High School without ever getting into a fight. I ascribe a lot of the reason for this to his practice of Kung Fu. He has always been very, very good at it, and he knows it. Even as small and bespectacled as he was (he’s in contacts now), during Middle School he carried himself with a quiet confidence that dissuaded bullies. The times when bullies would try to verbally harass him, he would respond with a coldly disdainful look. Then other kids would tell the bullies they were being jerks.

If he had to, my son could do serious damage to somebody. But it seems very unlikely he will ever have to, precisely because he knows he could. And that confidence comes through loud and clear in body language. It makes him free to be a very open and funny kid, which is further proof against bullies - nobody picks on the kids that other kids like.

The important part of this story is that he knows without a shadow of a doubt that if he ever did use his skills on somebody, he would have to answer not only to his mother and I, but also to our Sifu (Kung Fu instructor). And THAT is a confrontation of which he is justifiably afraid!

45

I am still in school, and while I haven’t been involved in any physical fights yet knock on wood, if some bully suddenly started hitting me, I would hit back, and tell someone about it if they didn’t stop. Last year I was in a verbal fight, and my brother taught me some simple moves, some of which have been described already. Pulling their hair down, and kneeing them in the face works. If it a a male, a good kick in the croch works if they are really harrassing me. I’m not one to start a fight, but if they provoke me or my friend, I would damn well finish it.

46

MGibson, so where’s the debate?

I see a lot of opinions (mine included), but no facts (I’m guilty too).

FTR-
I think ANYONE, child or adult, has the right to stop/prevent another from inflicting harm on the afore-mentioned person up to and including aggression. I took issue (and still do) with the vigilante attitude that seems to be prevalent.

It might’ve been hyperbole for me to intimate that you indicated, “you think the schools are only responsible for your child’s well-being while they are in the classroom, as opposed to while the kids are in the schools custody.” When actually you said, “. . .you could never depend on the faculty to ensure that you weren’t physically bullied except in a classroom. . . .” For clarification, if you don’t hold the authority (school, whatever) responsible for a child’s well-being in ALL situations while the child is within the custody of that authority, You are giving tacit approval of the way they handled the situation.

I stand by the sentiment that if a friend is no longer going to be a friend because you pleaded your case to a higher authority, you really don’t want that person as a friend to start with. Is that how your friends were in school? Is that what your parents taught you to value? Did your parents teach you that your worth was somehow tied to a popularity contest? -----You don’t really have to answer any of that.

This “debate” is perfect example of how to illustrate the “walk away” principle. I don’t have anything to add. I would guess that you aren’t going to dig me up some statistics saying so-and-so many kids reduced there risk by hitting back. And I’m not going to research any from my perspective either. I would love to see some cites though ----too lazy here.

47

fervour I want to respond to a couple things you’ve posted. First, you mentioned teaching kids to defer to authority. In my experience, I learned that deferring to authority is probably the best way to NOT have your problems handled and instead, it is the best way of getting bogged down in ludicrous beaurocracy. As MGibson said, the few times I’ve needed the cops, they showed up well after they were needed. IANAParent, but if something goes horribly wrong and I become one, I would like to teach my children to question authority and think for themselves, rather than always blindly defer to it. (I recognize the dilemma that will happen when my future children realize I AM the authority and then I’m in big trouble… But I haven’t really thought this through since I don’t plan on becoming a parent.)

Second, I wonder how you’d respond to incidents on the school bus. I was watching CNN recently (sorry, no cite) about these kids who had beaten the crap out of this one kid on a school bus (I think this was near Tampa, but it was somewhere in Florida). The driver did not report the kids, the driver did not turn the bus around and take the kids back to school. The driver did nothing. The parents, after meeting with school authorities and dog only knows who else, removed their kid from that school and put him in another one. The kid can’t figure out why the authority figure – the bus driver – did nothing to help him. Didn’t even pull over to pull the kids off the one getting beaten up. Now I have a whole rant about how the reporters on CNN were acting all shocked that such a thing could happen. Did these morons not ride the bus? What happens at school is one thing, but once you get on that bus… all bets are off. And all hope of protection by adults.

I did and got beaten up regularly. Bus beatings and bullying have been going on since kids started riding busses and rarely does anyone bring this into debate. Nobody in a position of authority does anything about it, so the beatings continue, generation after generation. (And there’s a whole OTHER rant about seatbelts and how we’d freak if anyone put our kids in a car without one, yet we send our kids to school every single day without seatbelts…) I think it’s the most serious of bully problems, yet there’s a whole page of posts before anyone even brings it up. The School Bus is like the No Man’s land for kids, and IMHO warrants that Wild West mentality: beat or be beaten. It’s the worst possible setting, because you can’t do anything to get away, you have no choice but to ride the bus and encounter the same assholes every single day, and there are no adults who appear to have the authority to do anything about what happens on a bus. Who’s in charge: the school, the bus company, or the parents? (And what do you do about the Parents who are just grown up bullies and don’t give a crap about your kid deferring to authority? Those same parents who teach their kids that violence is the only thing that they respond to, so it must be the only way to interact with people?)

Finally, I put this to The Dope: Is there a difference between how you’d teach your girl children to handle bullying and fighting and how you’d teach your boy children? As a girl, and a small one at that, fighting back was never brought up with me. I was beaten up a lot because I had no idea that there was anything else I could do. Back in my day, (mid 70s) I was taught that girls don’t fight. That is clearly bullshit but back then, that was the word. Personally, I think girls fight differently than boys and while I’m a big proponent of teaching how to pick battles and how to fight back – I think that needs to be customized toward gender. I also think the mentality changes by gender. Perhaps girls will respect you if you stand up to them and a punch is never thrown, but maybe that doesn’t work for boys who may think you’re a pussy unless you fight back to win. I think some of the unwritten “rules” Dopers have posted above, change with the genders.

Your thoughts?

48

I certainly don’t want my children to “submit to authority later in life” nor do I want them to “depend on authority” when it comes to the safety of bodies.

49

This is a subject that has come up many a time with my SO, and only lately have we come to any sort of concensus.

To put some background on it: I practice medieval and renaisssance martial arts and have practiced more modern eastern arts for many years. In the first year of junior I was picked on constantly. I wasn’t born in the US and my english was pretty bad at the time. This had the misfortune of putting me on the “To be picked on” list at school. I endured everything from beatings and humilation (spitting, mocking etc), to the point where there was a time I stayed home from school for a whole month, I was so scared to go back.

My mother, once she found out what was going on, did the whole “let’s talk to the teachers and school officials, they’ll knwo what to do” thing. Well, it didn’t work. Going to school continued to be the one most dreaded thing I had to do in a time where I should of felt the same about throwing out the garbage.

It wasn’t until I learned to defend myself that not only did I grow a backbone to confront the bullies, but I also learned the discipline of walking away, and not allowing emotions to control your actions.

I fully intend on teaching my kids historical martial arts and enrolling them in eastern martial arts classes. I think this, plus some words of experience from their dad will help them make the right decision, or atleast lessen the gravity of their mistakes.

The point mopst everyone so far has been making that they must learn when to fight, when to walk away is very important and merits restatement! :slight_smile:

Not really. I will however teach my daughter (if I should be lucky enough to have one) that it is NOT ok to hit guys just because you are a girl.

I think this attitude is very prevalent now a days in TV and the movies. In everyshow that a guy cheats/yells/does acts it is perfectly ok for the girl to respond with a slap or a punch. No, it’s NOT ok.

50

Frankly, I think the best policy would really be to teach kids to hit the teacher who didn’t step in to prevent violence against children. Not only would it go a long way towards encouraging a solution to the problem, it would also teach kids about abstract reasoning and the proper application of blame. After all, the bullies are children, their fault in the matter is mitigated.

Probably wouldn’t go over too well though.

51

He’s right; it makes you a target.

Unless you fight back, even if you get beaten, it still makes it seem like you’ve got guts to enforce what you say, that taunts can’t fling forever.

Having said that, I would like to say the students who are more atheletic and have taken some martial arts training are those who are more likely to have the cooler head and walk away.

Being a Junior in High School presently, I can safely say that bullying is not as big a threat, at least in my school district and the surrounding ones. The chance that taunts may become fisticuffs between students is fairly low, all but one of the fights in school in my past have been from bullying. And the faculty often does a great job at breaking them up when they happen. Most places in the school are visible to hired security guards, who often hover around us.

-PK

52

I don’t see teaching your child that it’s ok to hit back can be equated to vigelantism. Uh, did I just type a non existant word?

Realistically there’s only so much a school can do given the amount of students versus the amount of teachers. Unless of course we want to turn our schools into little prisons to monitor and control every aspect of kid’s behavior. Bullying has occured, is occuring, and will continue to occur at some level in every school in the United States.

Maybe at 6 years old the thought of being disliked by everyone in the class was an unpleasant thought. Perhaps at 6 years of age I didn’t have the wisdom to realize the importance of standing up for principles in lieu of social acceptance. I was child after all.

Issues of morality rarely have simple right and wrong answers.

Marc

53

No, but you did misspell it: vigilantism.

54

I was (am, really) chronically bullied since kindergarten or therabouts. My parents always, always taught me never to ever hit anyone. Ever. Run away if someone tried to hit me. In fifth grade, I started taking martial arts. After about five months, I got into my first fight, with a girl who had harassed me since forever, on the bus. She hit me, I forced her away from me and ran to the front of the bus. Niether of us got in trouble.

Cut to eighth grade. For the entire year, there was one guy who took my existance as a personal insult. He pretty much refused to call me anything but choice words such as “slut” - horrible inaccurate as well as insulting. He sat next to me (we had tables) in history class, and would often lean over to write said names on my papers. One day, towards the end of the year, I completely and totally lost my temper. The moment he opened his mouth to say something to me, I freaked out, jumped up, decked him in the face. He fell out of his chair, and I kicked him in the ribs. We both ended up in trouble, with several weeks of detention. My parents were furious, my teacher was furious, I had to talk to the school psychologist, etc. NOTHING could have prepared me for the wrath I faced when my martial arts instructor found out. I ended up sparring him (him: big 3rd degree blackbelt, me: tiny brown belt) for what had to have been twenty minutes. He did not go light contact. After that, it was a lecture. I knew how to fight more than that kid did. I broke the cardinal rule of TKD - never strike first.

If I ever have kids, I’m going to get them (unless they really dislike it) involved in martial arts. Know how to defend yourself in case you must, yeah. That’s important. Know that you should never fight unless you absolutely must? That’s just as important.

55

I studied traditional Karate for years (shodan in Goju-ryu Karate), and we taught the same thing. If our sensei discovered you had been in a fight, he wanted to hear the reasons. And only two reasons were valid - as a last-resort self defense, or going to the aid of someone else who was in the same situation. If a student was discovered fighting without valid reason, the first offense would get him a severe lecture from the Sensei. A second offense meant expulsion from the school.

But at the same time, it was expected that you would stand up for yourself if bullied, and that you would go to the aid of the weak when they were in trouble. It is your responsibilty to rise to your own defense and that of your loved ones and the weak.

I never had any trouble with bullies when I grew up, and this was before I studied Karate. My personal opinion is that bullies are attuned to a ‘victim’ profile. People who avert their gaze, cower in fear, shrink from contact, etc. One of the things martial arts can teach a child is confidence, and in my experience that confidence translates into a defense against bullies without ever having to lay a finger on anyone.

That same attitude translates into adult life. That doesn’t mean you have to go around giving people the hairy eyeball, but standing up to intimidation without showing fear often ends a confrontation before it really starts.

56

RE the advice for the bullied kid to hit the non-intervening teacher/bus driver/authority figure L- I don’t advise that. I DO ADVISE the kid to start yelling every profanity at the book at the non-intervening adult. That petty bureaucratic POS adult will pull those bullies off fast as anything to get to the little disrespectful victim- THEN the parents can really have fun with that adult.

Side effect- the bullies may actually back off in awe of the little victim who will call the Adult such things.

57

I usually just lurk around the more interesting debates, but I feel a pretty close connection to this topic so I might as well throw in my two cents.

My mom always taught me that fighting was wrong and uncivilized, while my dad gave me the much popular “Don’t hit first but always hit last” routine. But starting early in grade school, I was always very introverted and meek, and of course I became the perfect target for bullies, someone they could lord over and who was an easy pushover. But since I didn’t know better, and have always been tall and skinny, fighting back never seemed to be much of an option for me. Sometime early on in third grade my teachers picked up on my passivity and talked to my parents about it, and my mom even swayed to the side of sticking up for myself. I never thought I had any chance of winning a fight, but my dad was a wrestler all through high school and college, and he taught me how the ground can be a powerful equalizer. Pretty quick after that I ended up fighting the bullies that routinely picked on me, and while I didn’t win outright, I showed them that I was willing to stick up for myself if pushed to it and they promptly moved on to other more manageable kids. Problem solved, right?

Nope. The problem with getting a reputation as a person who will always fight if pushed far enough means that every bully who has an axe to grind will start searching you out. And in the early grades, the bullies have a nasty habit of being only one year older, but a whole lot bigger. Before much longer, I was fighting more and more often. While my grade school was a smallish school, and none of the fights ended with anything too bloody, the teachers and my parents always kinda saw that the bullies got what was coming to them, and I was just sticking up for myself. Being a teachers pet probably helped me on that front, and hurt me with the bullies. Middle school changed all of that. After two fights within the first month, I was labeled as a troublemaker and warned that any more fights would get me a month of suspension or possible expulsion. The problem was coming from the fact that after all the fights I had been through in grade school, now I was starting to kinda like to fight. In fact, I would say I enjoyed it a lot. The smallest thing would push my buttons now, and I would go out looking for people I didn’t like to see if they might just say something to set me off.

Ok then; back to grade school, and taking all the abuse that anyone could dish out. Only now, I had made so many enemies that all I got was near constant abuse. To top it off, people knew that I was banned from fighting anymore with a threat of expulsion. There was nothing to risk by harassing me. Back to square one, only now, I’m on the bad side of administration, so any complaints by me are waved off.

It began to reach a point where I seemed to have a group of hecklers follow me around almost everywhere I went. Mostly old bullies who came back to belittle me again, to make up for whatever face they had lost when we fought. It went on like that for over two years, until it reached its most fevered pitch right before the spring of my freshman year. I was still very tall and thin for that age (6’1" and 130 pounds) and by then most of the cliques in high school had formed, and unfortunately, one of them was composed of almost all of my old enemies, and they had taken quite a liking to harassing me as often as they could now. I’m not sure exactly when it was, but it had to be right before spring tryouts began for baseball, because me and a friend were playing catch at a park down the street from my school. I mouthed off something to the whole crew of them, and the biggest bully came over the fence to try and rattle my cage some more. I don’t know exactly what I was thinking, but I think that a combination of pent-up rage and that feeling of being bullied non-stop again got to me, and as he walked up to me my blood just boiled, and as soon as he got within my reach, without warning, I decked him with a baseball I was holding in my hand. I have still never seen anyone drop so fast in my life. But the strange part was that I wasn’t happy with just having stopped him, so I jumped on top of his chest and started to pound away at his face with the baseball some more. I don’t know exactly what came over me, but I guess that it was a lot like people describe road rage. I saw what I was doing, but I couldn’t have stopped it even if I had wanted to. Finally both his friends and mine dragged us apart and when I saw him all beaten up and crying, I felt worse than I ever could have imagined. Not the vindication I expected when I first had the idea. Needless to say, after that I had a reputation as a psycho who might just kill you if you pissed me off enough, and almost every trace of bullying disappeared from my life.

Since then (ten years ago), I have only been in a couple other fights, and always on someone else’s behalf. I don’t think the solution to bullies is to teach kids how to fight, I personally think that you have to teach parents how to make sure they don’t raise a bully. Because there are always bigger, stronger and meaner bullies who will see you as a challenge to be broken and the more you beat, the stronger they get and the larger their gang becomes.

58

Feh, I remember when I was in school I got bullied once. I told my Mom, my Mom told my Dad. My Dad then asked me (angrily) “Why didn’t you hit him back?” To which I told him “I didn’t want to get my ass kicked or get into trouble.”

That unfortunately was the wrong answer. He got so pissed, he wound up calling this boys dad and telling him that “YOUR BOY AND MY BOY GOT SOME UNFINISHED BUSSINESS TO TEND TO. I’M DRIVING MY BOY OVER RIGHT THIS MINUTE SO THEY CAN FINISH WHAT YOUR BOY STARTED IN SCHOOL!” (My Dad can be a very scary man when he wants to be…)

Anyway we get over there and the poor guys Dad wont open the door because he’s in fear for his life. So we leave and m Dad tells me the next day in school I had better finish what that boy started or I’d have to answer to him!

So the next day in school I knew what I had to do. I also knew that this kid could take me in no time flat. so I opted for the supprize sucker puch out on the playground. because I took him by suprize I was pretty much able to kick his ass with not a whole lot of difficulty. From that day forward NOBODY but NOBODY jacked with me again. (at least not in that school.)

Now, what MY Dad did was a little extreme I’ll give you that. And I doubt I could ever do that to my son. I did however learn a valueable lesson though. YOU CAN’T BE ANYBODIES F’N DOOR MATT. It will only lead you to shamefull, depressing, feelings, which is the way I pretty much felt at the time that happened.

So yeah, I’ll teach my kid to hit back. But only as a last resort. Having said that I’ll also teach my kid that these are things he should handle on his own as well. IN other words don’t go running to the teacher everytime some bully give you shit. I’ll also teach him he can always come to me for advice under ANY circumstances.

59

Thank you all for your thoughtfull contributions. They will be very usefull in helping me bring up Trusquirt (currenlty 19 months old).

In case you’re curious, I like the idea of the both of us learning a Martial Art together. I plan on emphasizing to my son that there are three levels of permissible violence:

-None whatsoever: against ridicule and insults
-Only enough to make him stop: agains bullies and common assaults
-Inflincting of incapacitating injury: against trench-coat weirdos and criminals.

I think the point made many times above that learning when and to what extent to fight is more important than knowing how to fight is a very good, and commonly neglected, one.