[QUOTE=Phlosphr]
… and I believe if he speaks with his Karate teacher and say’s something like… “I don’t want to learn how to kick the bully’s ass, I just want to be able to defend myself with dignity…” I think he will learn very well… Anyone agree?
[/QUOTE]
Nope. Kick the bully’s ass.
Short of nuking him out of orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
Another aspect is to try to figure out why this kid in particular is getting bullied, and see what you can do to change that.
My understanding is that often the bullied kid has difficulty interpreting and responding appropriately to various behavioral clues, expressions, etc.
We attended some social services classes and read several books that - I think - increased my son’s and our awareness about such things. There is a ton of literature and other resources out there on this topic.
[QUOTE=Phlosphr]
BTW - The nephew is in Karate and has been for 1 year…would talking to the sensei be a good idea?
[/QUOTE]
Absolutely. The fact that your nephew hasn’t tied the bully into a knot shows that he is listening to his instructor when they talk about self-control. Some positive reinforcement from the instructor will go a long way right about now.
Oh yeah - just about any decent kids’ MA instructor will be extremely hesitant to instruct a kid how to beat up another kid.
Punch him in the nose. And punch him in the nose again if he even looks at you wrong, 'cause it’s the psycological stuff assholes will say ‘but I wasn’t doing anything!’ about that is the most insidious.
You don’t want this person to be your friend, you want them to stay the fuck away from you. Unfortunately, there’s a good possibility that your nephew would get suspended from this, as bullies play the teachers and school system far more that you ever could, and teachers seem to ignore things right up until well-deserved retaliation is finally meted out. It’s also reason that ‘talking it out’ with anyone involved isn’t going to work.
I spent way too many years of my childhood putting up with that crap, and I’m convinced I could have spared myself a lot of that with a well executed palm to the face.
I had problems with this until high school - I like to think I’m as any of us are, but it’s still a regret of mine that I never made it physical.
One thing that earned me respect was striking a teacher who stepped in to break up the fight…though I wouldn’t recommend that course of action.
Somehow, your nephew needs to conquer his fear of the bullies. They torment him because he’s afraid of them. And it’s not so simple as pretending to not be afraid (although it can help) – bullies can smell fear, even if it’s hidden or repressed, and the fear empowers them. Once your nephew learns to get over his fear, the bullies will find another target.
How does that work? Well…that’s the tricky part, I haven’t got a clue. But forget about talking to the teachers or the bully’s parents – that method just makes things worse.
[QUOTE=Ethilrist]
Or, in my son’s case:
Get grabbed by an older kid on the first day of the last week of school and get slammed into a locker, almost losing an eye in the process.
Turn around.
Front snap kick to the solar plexus, launching the older kid across the hall. End of fight. Older kid never bothers son again.
Get suspended any way, which was the older kids’ plan all along.
Watch as Mom rips the principal several new ones about their absolutely stoopid rules, pointing out that Mom has been teaching several girls in 7th grade how to fight for the past several years, and they’re going to be freshman next year, and very much do not have a victim mentality.
[/QUOTE]
If step 5 did not result in reinstatement with a clean record, then
These idiotic ZT rules will stay in effect until we, as parents and taxpayers, do something about them. You gotta absolutely walk it to them with everything you possibly can.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
[/QUOTE]
I like it.
I agree that “ignore them and they will go away” and “turn the other cheek” or possibly the worst pieces of advice that you can give a kid. I had a very scary experience with that my senior year of high school. It wasn’t pure bullying so much as very sincere death threats from a local Crips gang member. He and his friends kept telling me over and over that they were going to kill me and they set a date for a showdown. The told me to meet them right after school in a wooded area and if I wasn’t there, horrible things would ensue. I couldn’t get many people to go with me for obvious reasons but I still went and when I broke into the clearing, there were about 20 black guys up to age thirty standing in a rough circle. My aggressor was standing in the middle and I just walked up and tried to punch him but basically missed. We fell to the ground and started wrestling and beating. The circle closed in and I started getting kicked and beaten from them. The few friends that went with me were getting beaten as well even though they were putting up a good fight. Suddenly, the Sheriff’s Department burst in and started making arrest. One of my female friends tipped them off. Some of the older guys did indeed have pipes and pistols and everything else it turns out. It could have been really bad news They let me go. The principle and football coach called me in the next day and told me how proud they were of me. Those guys never even spoke to me again.
[QUOTE=Dinsdale]
Yeah, I think that image is definitely BS, but my WAG is that there is some truth to the idea that - like many/most predators - bullies prefer easier victims. It might be worth 1 grade school tussle, in order to lessen the likelihood of continual hassles.
[/QUOTE]
My experience was in a small town with a strictly enforced social order. The stuff that Big Bad Voodoo Lou was dealing with is completely foreign to me. A bully who did something like beating an injured kid with his own crutches would have gotten his ass kicked by other bullies, if not by an adult. So I’m not sure how much relavance it has to dealing with bullies today.
I had experience with four bullies in elementary and junior high. In all four cases I was the kid being picked on. In three of the four cases, the bully stopped because of violence on my part. The pattern for these three is the same: the bully engaged in a predictable pattern of petty humiliation. For as long as they were only humiliating me, I smiled, laughed it off, and said things like (for example) “Wow, I wish I could be as cool as you,” or “I bet I’d be really popular if I could find someone to pick on, too!” but as soon as anything they did crossed the line to causing me physical pain, I opened up on them.
The “one punch in the nose” canard is not true, by the way. You never hit a bully just once. Read the first chapter of Ender’s Game; the way you deal with a bully is to spaz out on him. Go big, go violent, and escalate. If you’re going to get suspended for fighting, make it worthwhile. Don’t teach “one good punch” to a kid who can’t put anything behind it. The three fights I ended up in were all over in a few seconds because the bully was surprised as hell that I had done anything, and before he could even try to fight back he was already on the defensive. I generally ended up with a bloodied nose (but I get those just flying on planes) and the bully with scrapes and bruises on his face and neck. I only knocked one of them to the ground with one punch, but he started to scramble to get up and so I had to kick him a few times.
The fourth bully, by the way, was one of the scary ones – the kind you can tell are mentally unstable. He was using drugs in 7th grade, he came to school drunk occasionally, and there was no telling what he was going to do. He got caught with a knife at one point, and my dad heard about it. He told me if the kid was bullying me to just get away; don’t be near him, ever. He would give me shit now and again but generally ignored me. One day he started throwing bars of soap at me in the gym shower. The gym teacher heard one of the other kids hollering about it, came into the shower room and cleared us all out back into the gym except this guy. Silence for about three minutes, then hollering like the Voice Of God for twenty seconds, and then a crack like a gunshot… and the kid screamed like a little girl as the sound repeated over and over. In my middle school the teachers were permitted to use corporal punishment, and Mr. Bunting sentenced the kid on the spot to one lick of the paddle for every bar of soap he had thrown. I think he got something like twelve strokes before he lost his voice from squealing. So I’m basically in favor of corporal punishment now. :eek:
I just noticed that many of the punch the bully scenarios where the victim got a severe reprisal only consisted of one punch. perhaps the old wives tale could be vindicated if it were amended to something like “Punch the bully in the face until your arms are tired, or if you leave a severe scar, he will crumple like a rag doll.”
I believe that a parent should let the principal know that he will hold said principal accountable for failure to force **immediate ** compliance by bully. After all, this is how ‘the system’ would deal with parents for such willful omissions as not forcing attendance at school.
Just a thought…can’t a child inform the police of a physical assault on himself from another student? Just because a school doesn’t want that to happen is no reason to say that a crime hasn’t been committed.
hh
We’ve gone through a bit of this with Hallboy (who is a complete and utter pacivist–he simply will not fight back).
For Hallboy, the solution is to be aware of a potential bully and stay the hell away from him/her. In his situation, frequently, it isn’t simply one bully, but a bully idiot who is backed up by three or four of his closest friends, who are more than happy to jump in after the first punch is thrown. Four against one, with the odd stacked against Hallboy. I have attempted to get Hallboy to learn to stay away from stupid people doing stupid things, regardless of the situation. (Bullies, as we all know, and often a known entity. Other kids know immediately who is the bully.) When I was a kid, I was the one who would step up for the other kids being bullied. There were many scuffles in the dirt, with me pounding on someone because they dared to bully one of my friends, or a younger kid. Hallboy, though…he’s having none of it. Won’t defend himself, even when hit.
Another thing is that if bullying is happening on school property, or on the school bus, then let an adult know! As a former school bus driver, I couldn’t do anything about behavior I didn’t know about! There are several options a driver has (and the school district has), but if it’s not known, there’s not a whole lot anyone can do about it. Many schools have a no bullying stance and won’t tolerate any of it.
[QUOTE=saoirse]
My experience was in a small town with a strictly enforced social order. The stuff that Big Bad Voodoo Lou was dealing with is completely foreign to me. A bully who did something like beating an injured kid with his own crutches would have gotten his ass kicked by other bullies, if not by an adult. So I’m not sure how much relavance it has to dealing with bullies today.
[/QUOTE]
I probably didn’t explain clearly enough – my friend was a normal (not huge) kid, and the bully was a gigantic football thug who was on crutches from a game-related injury. However, it didn’t stop him from using them as weapons to beat my friend with.
FWIW, I went to a very racially-mixed high school in Miami in the mid-'90s, probably over half Hispanic, with the rest an uneasy mix of whites and blacks. There were plenty of gangs, and we even had a few mini-race riots. Whenever fights broke out, the same situation occurred: Person A would push Person B and the fight started, and everyone else would go crazy and start running around, until Person C inevitably pushed or crashed into Person D, in which case another satellite fight would start, and more people would start running around.
Another vote to fight it out. I got chased down by a pair when I was in the sixth grade, I waited for the dumber one to touch me and then I put a fist in his eye. He went down like a punk, and his friend was just standing there gaping at me. I was a superhero at school for months, and my dad was gleaming with quiet pride while making a token effort to tell me that fighting wasn’t the best solution. When the bully’s parents came in to whine about it, the principal told them to fuck right off. The bully didn’t become my friend, and still tried to talk big, but he never did it within fifteen feet of me again. And if he can’t hit the guy in the face, there’s always the balls.
We just had to deal with this very situation this past year. My son had experienced some problems with one particular child from time to time through elementary school. Last year, they switched to middle school (5th grade), and my son began being picked on more regularly on the school bus by this kid. We weren’t aware of it until my son was really clearly upset one day after school. The harrassment had escalated to tripping and pushing him down the stairwell of the bus.
I absolutely advocated fighting back, but my son just would not do so. We communicated our concerns to the principal, noting the explicit rules the school district has in place about bullying. Her initial attempts to place the child in a specific seat on the school bus seem to have been subverted by the bus driver, who let the kid continue to move around the bus, and apparently allowed stuff like tripping my son and pushing him down the stairwell to go unremarked upon.
We documented everything, particularly our correspondence with the principal, and I amped up the degree to which I referred to our need to have this stopped or we would be pursuing further recourse through whatever means we could. I also noted that the school bus driver was both failing to enforce the standing rules of the school district as well as the principal’s attempted intervention.
I was fairly surprised, but the bullying stopped after that.
I think in general that the idea of turning the other cheek is a good one, but it really doesn’t help in the bullying situation. I think that the effects of bullying are incredibly long lasting, particularly if they aren’t resolved by the child sticking up for him or herself.
My pre-college school days were never fun, as I had a parent who was a teacer in the same school system teaching a very un-hip subject. Every bad grade she gave out meant some kind of confrontation to me. Like Billy Joel says, it taught me to fight and to lose ‘ok’, but I tell every teacher I meet the same thing: Never have your kid in the same school where you work. Working out ‘vacation schedule differences’ is a whole lot better than having poor grades taken out of your kid’s hide.
When my eldest son came to me and said he’d been picked on repeatedly, I finally gave in on something he had wanted but was expensive: Karate classes. He’s been in it less than a year, but he has earned a belt and his self-confidence has improved tremendously. Also, those ‘being picked on’ incidents seem to have almost gone away. No, he isn’t playing Bully, its just that the Bullies from before have moved on to easier pickings.
[QUOTE=Count Blucher]
My pre-college school days were never fun, as I had a parent who was a teacer in the same school system teaching a very un-hip subject. Every bad grade she gave out meant some kind of confrontation to me. Like Billy Joel says, it taught me to fight and to lose ‘ok’, but I tell every teacher I meet the same thing: Never have your kid in the same school where you work. Working out ‘vacation schedule differences’ is a whole lot better than having poor grades taken out of your kid’s hide.
[/QUOTE]
My parents are both teachers in Miami-Dade County’s public schools – my father in a middle school and my mother in a high school. For this very reason, they didn’t allow my brother and I to go to the same schools they taught at (even though they are both generally very popular and well-liked teachers).
I was a shy petite girl. I think I was in 6th grade when this boy started bullying me. His friends wanted nothing to do with it so I don’t know what his motivation was. After a couple weeks of his harassment, I finally hauled off and punched him in the face. It stopped right there. For years he was known as the dude who got beat up by a girl.
My principals response? “Good for you Jill!!”
Once in a great while you’ve got to do something that’s wrong in order to set things right.
My daughter is 9 and has been the target of bullying at least in some part for the past two years. She had a lazy eye and really crooked front teeth, plus she’s a little bit of a bookworm. (She has lots of friends and spends lots of time playing with other kids - but will sometime just sit by the wall and read.) She had surgery which corrected her lazy eye a year ago and she got braces this summer which have already had a huge impact on her appearance - you can barely even tell that her teeth were misshappen. But she also began wearing glasses this summer (although I’ve picked the most stylish ones I could get.)
Anyway - I said all that to say that there were/are clear reasons that she was being picked on (not excusing the kids for doing so). I do believe that parents have the responsibility to minimize the number of issues that their kid could be picked on for. Poor parents need to make sure that their kid is at least clean and well groomed. If you have the means to get your kid clothes that are stylish (not necessarily designer clothes) than you should do that. Teach your kids how to behave in socially appropriate ways. Make sure your kid has some knowledge of the current fads (toys, books, cartoons, sport thing, etc) so that they’ll have some way to connect with other kids.
This is what I’ve been teaching her:
Physical violence (she’s been the target of a few instances)
If someone hits her she is to tell them ONCE not to do that again and walk away if possible (under no circumstances is she to run*). If they hit her again she is to hit them back and harder than they hit her (we practiced punching). The point is to deter them from hitting her again. If it turns into a full-on fight then her goal is to hit the person as much and as hard as it takes so that she can get away. I told her that I will ALWAYS back her up on this as long as she is not the aggressor. She could expect to get in trouble from the principal but she would not get in trouble at home.
The first time she felt confident enough to implement this (and really the first time I gave up on the pc nonsense and really pushed her to respond physically) was this spring shortly before school let out. There was this girl who would just walk up to her at recess and hit her. And my kid would do nothing except tell the teacher (which was effectively worthless**). Finally after complaining about it a few times to me, I made her practice hitting me in the arm so she could get over being nervous about hitting someone. The next day she went to school and saw the other girl coming towards her at recess. My kid hit the other girl really hard before the girl had a chance to do anything. She cried and went running to the teacher and of course they both got hauled down to the principal’s office. My kid told her side of the story and the other girl confessed to hitting her (surprisingly). The end result was that the bully lost all recess priviledges for the remainder of the school year after being suspended for a few days. No punishment for my kid and the bully left her alone. 
Teasing
The big, big goal here is to not let on that you’re bothered by the teasing. I do believe that if the bully isn’t getting the desired reaction he/she is less likely to bother you the next time. I’ve been giving her stock responses, scenarios to act out and we practice by teasing each other lightheartedly. She isn’t good with stinging retorts yet, but luckily the teasing she gets is easy enough to respond too. For instance some little brat kept calling her “brace face” so she would say to him (in a condescending way) “Noooo, my braces are on my teeth, not all over my face. See, teeth (points to teeth) face (points to face). Geez, even my baby sister knows the difference.” And for the few times she was called “four eyes” she would say “No, no, no. I have two eyes, lets count them, see 1…2. Do you need to go to kindergarten and learn to count again?” She’s had great success with the smart ass comments - gets the other kids laughing at the bully instead of her***.
*This will change as her ability to read situations and the possibility of life threatening ones increases.
**In general, the teachers at her school are fantastic and the principal is very hard-nosed and strict about bullying. But there will always be teachers who’s reaction to something is that if they didn’t see it then it didn’t happen. Fair or not.
***This will need to change also in the coming years as she will need to learn when saying something instead of walking away will cause more trouble than it’s worth. But for now it’s building her confidence and making her less of a target.
I think, like KGS said, the key is to not be afraid. Realistic roleplaying & practice helps bigtime, especially with grade school kids. When you know what to do in a specific situation you’re less afraid of that situation.