How to Raise Friendly Kids (1): What are Friends for?

When we play The Value Game in my parenting workshops, friendship is usually somewhere at the top of the list after happiness and love. As part of the game, I pretend to be a fairy and ask the parents to write the things they would like to bless their kids with. Most parents do not know they can, in fact, grant their kids those wishes and all they need is the special “fairy dust” of love and determination.

Every interaction with others requires social skills, so friendly kids have a better life than those who are not friendly. Usually, they are healthier and have higher self-esteem.

Although some kids are naturally friendlier than other, social skills can be learned from a very early age. As with any other skill, the younger the child, the less they need to unlearn and the more “naturally” friendly they will be, so there is no better time to start than today.

Some time ago, some of my son’s friends came over for a music jam and had lunch with us. One of the topics of conversation was “Facebook” and Gal and I asked them how long they spent on Facebook. Most of them (except one) said about 4 hours. I asked in shock, “A week?” and they said, “No, a day”…

This post is part 1 of 4 in the series How to Raise Friendly Kids

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How to Help Bullying Bystanders (2)

In the last bullying post, I wrote 25 tips to help bystanders who are involved in bullying. In the bullying game, there are the bully, the victim and the bystanders. Each of them is very important in eliminating the bullying phenomenon.

The bystanders are the people that watch a bully act and either get themselves involved or not in favor of the bully or the victim. As a reminder, here are the 5 types of bystanders:

* Ring Leaders
* Associates
* Reinforcers
* Outsiders
* Defenders

On average, when another person gets involved to defend a bullying victim, the bullying will stop within 10 seconds. Think about it: 10 seconds are enough for the bully to take a step back and for the situation to improve for everyone. Therefore, I am sure you understand how important it is for us to give power to the defenders (and inspire more of them), because they hold the key to making a big shift in bullying elimination.

This post is part 17 of 35 in the series Bullying

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How to Help Bullying Bystanders

Bullying involves additional “players” besides the bully and the victim. All the other players are called “bystanders” collectively and include the “ring leader”, the “associates”, the “reinforcers”, the “outsiders” and the “defenders”. Here are the characteristics of each of these types.

Ring Leader – These are kids in power who orchestrate a bullying act by using their social influence. They do not bully directly but use a bully’s weakness to harass other weak kids.

Associates – These are children who actively join the bully. It could be because they are afraid of the bully or the ring leader, but they do not initiate the bullying themselves. In some strange way, they are also victims.

Reinforcers – These kids do not bully directly but give a feedback to the bully by commenting, smiling or laughing. They do not initiate an act of bullying towards other kids, but they increase the bully’s confidence by being a supportive audience.

Outsiders – These children are on the victim’s side, but they keep quiet when they witness an act of bullying. They are afraid of the bully, so they say nothing and do nothing in order to avoid drawing any attention to themselves.

Defenders – These kids are rare. They intervene and actively try to stop the bully and comfort the victim.

As you can understand, the involvement of un-involvement of all these characters can make a huge difference to the frequency and intensity of the bullying in any environment. On average, kids who get involved and defend a bullied victim stop the bullying act within 10 seconds. We need more of them!

This post is part 16 of 35 in the series Bullying

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How to Help Bullying Victims (4)

The bullying game cannot be played without the victim. For bullies to gain power, they must find a victim to take it away from. If we help the victims not to be easy targets, it will make it a bit harder for the bullies to take anything away from them.

Many of the tips described in list series are useful both for kids and for adults. Much like any other list, some are easier to implement and others are less so, but I promise you that if you go over each of them and dedicate time each week to implementing at least one, the bullying will decrease and may eventually stop.

Again, if you are a parent concerned about your child being a victim of bullying, some of the tips here are mainly for you. You can arrange for your kids to get to school in a safe way, order food for them so they do not take money to school and even talk to their teachers and ask them to get involved. Do not expect your kids to figure this out all by themselves. It is hard to be bullied and harder to think clearly and come up with mature solutions, so take charge!

This post is part 15 of 35 in the series Bullying

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How to Help Bullying Victims (3)

Bullying, as you may remember, is the 4th common reasons kids call helpline services. 13% of children aged 15-18 experience continual harassment and 14-48% of children say they have been cyber bullied.

85% of kids who have been bullied via their mobile phone know the bully and 87% of cyber bullies do it through text messaging (SMS), yet 58% of kids do not know how to report cyber bullying.

The results?

75% of victims have symptoms of post-traumatic stress and 65% of them still have those symptoms five years later. In the long term, bullied children are more likely to drop out of school, to use drugs and to use alcohol.

It is critical to our society that we stop this phenomenon.

This post is part 14 of 35 in the series Bullying

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How to Help Bullying Victims (2)

Last week, I wrote the first 25 tips to help victims bullying cope with and avoid being bullied. As I have written before, I believe in a holistic approach to stopping this phenomenon of bullying, which is a cycle of violence and abuse.

Building the victims’ confidence to function as a “bully repellent” is a good start. In some cases, this will stop them feeling so weak they have to bully someone else to restore their personal power.

Here are the next 25 tips to help the bully victim.

This post is part 13 of 35 in the series Bullying

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How to Help Bullying Victims

The bullying game is played by more than just the bully and the bullied victim. There are the bystanders, the home of the bully, the workplace, the schools and society in general. Each of them needs help in gaining power to make sure they do not try to steal it from someone weaker.

I believe that all players in the game need help. There is a dynamic that needs to be broken and each participant, whether directly or not, can break the bullying cycle. In the next chapters, I will write tips to help each of the players to break the bullying cycle. This post contains tips for the bullied victim.

Since I believe a holistic approach is best in creating social change, I will direct these tips at both kids and adults. Helping bullied kids and adults will make sure they do not continue the cycle by bullying others to gain some perceived power that was lost.

There are 100 tips on the list (25 in each post). Each of them separately can make a huge change in your life. Study them carefully and find those you think are easy enough for you to apply. If you are a parent and you want to help your bullied child or prevent your child from being bullied, find techniques that are easy enough to explain and to apply and focus on each of them separately. Most of the tips are about building your emotional and social intelligence, so anyone can use of them.

This post is part 12 of 35 in the series Bullying

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Workplace Bullying (2)

If you look at the forms of workplace bullying listed in Bullying (10): Workplace Bullying, you know that almost everyone who works for others has been somehow bullied at work. The expectation to stay at work late has increased in the last 20 years so much that when you talk to people about getting home on time to be with their kids, they are 100% convinced that leaving work at 5pm (as they should do) will threaten their job, their career and their financial situation.

17 years ago, when we lived in California, all my women friends said their husbands returned home at 8pm, barely had a chance to kiss the kids goodnight and only spent weekends with the family. For everyone – the wives, the kids and the workers – that was part of life and they felt they had to accept it.

This post is part 11 of 35 in the series Bullying

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Workplace Bullying

When we talk about bullying, we mainly think of children and the perceived increase in acts of bullying at schools. However, as we discovered in Home of the Bully, it is very likely that the parents or older siblings who are raising child bullies have been bullied by their parents or are being bullied at work themselves. Therefore, they are merely trapped in a cycle of bullying.

In Australia, it is estimated that 1 of 6 people are bullied at work. A research done by Duncan and Riley on the staff of a school cluster found that 97% of staff thought they had been or were still being bullied by another person at work.

In 2002, it was estimated that workplace bullying cost the Australian economy 36 billion dollars a year, not including stress leave people took due to bullying.

But the implications of this phenomenon are far more devastating than the financial toll society pays for bullying. People who are bullied and made to feel weak at work have a higher chance of finding someone weaker to pick on to regain their power. If they have kids, those kids might become their victims at home.

Besides the “obvious” workplace bullies – employers and managers (“the boss”) – anyone may act like a bully: subordinates, colleagues, clients, suppliers, individually or in groups. Anyone who feels weak may use bullying to regain their power by putting another down.

This post is part 10 of 35 in the series Bullying

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Home of the bully (2)

In my work for Together for Humanity, I must have read hundreds of articles while looking for solutions to specific forms of bullying and there was very limited mention of parents. I can easily understand why there was so little focus on parents’ role in eliminating bullying. It seems there is a fear of addressing the issue, as if pointing a finger at the parents will only make things worse.

Although I believe blaming is not a good strategy in solving any problem, I do think that shutting our eyes to the importance of the parenting style in creating the problem is not going to get us any closer to the solution.

Parents are the most important role models for their kids and the most valuable socializing agent. When their parenting style supports bullying behavior, they do not do it because they are mean and abusive. They do it because they do not know any other way or are not aware of the effects of their parenting on their kids and on society.

I think that avoidance and fear of discussing the parenting side is not doing parents any favors. By drawing attention to the importance of parenting, we can actually give parents back the power they need in order to run their family life in a productive, supportive and positive way. As a result (almost a side effect), we will also be reversing the bullying trend.

This post is part 9 of 35 in the series Bullying

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