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4 Steps for Parents and Teachers to Prevent Bullying at Home and School

Schools are not feeling as safe for many students as they once were.  In fact on any given day 160,000 students stay at home due to fear of bullying or other forms of violence here in the United States.  Everyone involved have concern in regard to the safety of children in school, from the children themselves to the parents and educators.  Yet for many educators prevention and intervention is difficult due to a lack of specific training.

Added to this is the issue that many times both teachers and parents have certain beliefs that we will discuss in detail later that tend to cause them to overlook true bullying situations.  When this overlooking occurs it leads the students to believe that the teacher or parent is not concerned or does not care or that they simply are unaware of the situation or problem leading them not to come forward to speak about the issue.

If there is one thing that the research shows Continue reading “4 Steps for Parents and Teachers to Prevent Bullying at Home and School”

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Bully Prevention: Parent & Teachers role

We are all teachers.  No matter our other roles in life, we are all teachers.  Parents, siblings, teachers, administrators, public officials – all of us are teachers who are watched and on some level emulated.  So everything that we do and say is key to the growth and development of the youth in our society.
There is one thing that is clear about our roles in society.  If we want to reduce the amount of bullying that takes place in society in both young and old we must all be willing to intervene when we see it occurring.  Doing so will reduce and prevent bullying and the impact it has on our youth.  This is true for everyone, but especially teachers and parents.  It is with this belief in mind that I have researched this subject and will begin to report my findings here in this setting.
As in any subject or area that we want to make changes, our own personal awareness and knowledge effects our ability to make changes either in ourselves or in others.  I hope that parents and teachers will use this resource as a way of increasing their own awareness, as we work and report on ways to control and prevent bullying from taking place by attacking the root causes of the problems.  The goal here is to work on solutions and not just to point out the problems and difficulties.  This requires complete buy in that we can make a difference and then the energy to follow through.

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What is Bully Kindness?

The Buddhist Answer to Bullies

Published in Psychology Today this article list 5 steps in stopping bullying.

  1. See the suffering
  2. Protect yourself
  3. Use Mantra’s
  4. Apply Kindness
  5. Cut-off 

 

If you would like to see the full article here is the link. The Buddhist Answer to Bullies

I found this article interesting, though I must say that we must be careful in all of our suggestions to our children or ourselves about bullying that we do not leave the victim feeling “less than”.  This leads to a life time of issues that will only need to be dealt with later in life. 

I am looking forward to teaching a Verbal Self Defense this fall that has been taught to and used by police officers all over the world.  It is called Verbal Judo.  I recently completed a college course for this and am preparing to bring it to our community this fall.  Verbal Judo is excellent in that it allows all parties to not lose face and stay strong themselves, especially the victim of the attack.