If your children were bullied at school, what would you do?

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I wouldn't do ANYTHING!! !! !! !! !! My kid would see the counsler and just say "HEY, a bully is hurting me!"! You better stop him/her, or I will take care of it myself. When they didn't do anything, my kid would try to use about 3 times as much force. If s/he slips up and uses too much, OH WELL.... And if the bully were too old, you could bet I would sue, etc....

You see, I was pretty strong when I was really little but given no real opportunity to get real strong and I later just didn't even bother. And nobody was there to help me, etc.... TODAY, things are VERY different. Iwas also pacifist to a fault.

Anyway, I would work AGAINST a child of mine having those problems.

The "fight back" advice is almost as bad as the "just ignore them" advice. Whenever I responded to verbal taunting by physically attacking my tormenters I ended up getting reprimanded and punished along with the others. Only for me the verbal reprimand from an adult was magnitudes more traumatic. I was the good kid that rarely got in any trouble with anyone. The verbal reprimands and detentions hardly affected or deterred the bullies on the other hand. They were hardened predators that didn't give a crap how many after school detentions they received. It was not fair at all.

Last edited by marshall on 04 May 2009, 6:06 pm, edited 5 times in total.

I have little girls, so their bullying will probably different. Most girls bully with insults designed to lower self esteem and harassment. They will constantly follow you around calling you fat, but never once laying a hand on you. Most of the time anyway. Most of the time to, your daughter isn't going to tell you it's going on. I don't think it really happens until older grade school/middle school age. But I'm not positive on that one.

First, I plan on handling things by getting intelligence. I don't mean getting smarter, I mean I plan on spying on my kids. I will handle it the way my father did. I won't control my kids, but I will try to guide them based on the info I get. If it's something I have to talk to them about, I'll do what my father did when I asked him how he found out all that info about me, "God told me."

Second, irregardless of bullies, my children when old enough will probably do a martial art. Not so much to learn how to fight, but to learn how to live. I love eastern philosophies, and I like to supplement Christian teachings with them, especially the Tao. Many of those concepts are taught through the martial arts program associated to it.

Third, I will personally train my daughters with some basic self defense moves. They will be designed for them to bring down a grown man, but all will be defensive tactics with open hands. If you close your fist, it's hard to prove self defense in court. I won't teach them too many offensive moves until they are old enough to learn when to use them.

Fourth, I really hope that I can provide the psychological support for them to have healthy enough self esteems that they won't be phased by girly drama. But for sure, if I find out some girls are harassing my girls, their (the bullies) daddies will be getting a lot of male enhancement junk mail to their workplace.

I would teach them comebacks to do to bullies and tell them to bully them back and throw their bullying back at them like I did when I was a kid. Now bullies hate their victims fighting back and bullying them back and they also hate being ignored by them so they might get nastier but just keep ignoring them until they finally get the hint they can't win. The worst thing the bully might do is beat the victim because they know they can't ignore that so that's when I would say fight back if they start beating them. Then I would be telling my child's school how stupid they are for punishing my child for defending him/herself because the bully grabbed him or her and started beating him or her. If I were rich, I'd threaten to sue their pants off if they didn't drop the charges or punish the bullies too.

Actually, in most schools in the US, if the kid gets beat up, he will still get in trouble for fighting even if he didn't fight back.

I think if I had to do school over again, I would like to try doing it as a homeschooled student. Most of the bullies that I knew during my school days were usually clever enough and socially shrewd enough to get away with their bullying. The bullies were usually pretty good liars, too, and fooled many of the good people in authority into believing that the victims had caused the problem, and that they, the bullies, were victims.

If my child was suspended for defending himself, I would take him out for icecream and reward him.

Suing, I think, is not the answer. Simply pulling your child out and finding a better school for him/her is really the best answer I can think of. The only reason the bullying would have gotten so bad is if the child is isolated from responsible adults. Being the responsible adult means you respond accordingly - finding a school with responsible teachers and principals.

I wasn't talking about VERBAL taunting! HECK, what is 3 times the force of a verbal taunt anyway? NOPE! I mean if they hit you with 50 pounds of force, you hit them with 150 pounds of force. As for verbal taunts, I have no way to counter those other than showing it is false and/or finding something at least equally as true and embarrassing about the other person.

Still, some people just WON''T shut up! BTW I have had ALL kinds of bullying, from simple verbal taunts to a gang bashing my head into some lockers. I think I know what I am talking about here. Lawyers are a VERY last resort, and don't solve ANYTHING! There are potentially 300+ bullies, so how could the COURTS even handle that? Of course, a win isn't likely to stop even ONE bully.

So a verbal taunt should be handled ONLY by a counter used as a defense or a VERBAL counter attack. Like for like.

Well, I was always bullied for not doing anything back in elementary because my parents told me to ignore them.
Now I'm different. I have a strict Eye for an Eye rule. If I get punched, they get punched. If I get kicked, they get kicked. I don't take sh*t from anyone anymore.

Fight back. That is the best way.

Well at that age there weren't ever any verbal counter attacks that I could think of. After a while there's only so much you can take. There were only a couple occasions I recall where I snapped.

I don't think a civilized society should tolerate unprovoked abuse. It's not acceptable for adults to randomly harass people just for the thrill of it. I don't see why it's considered no big deal when kids do it. Maybe bringing back corporal punishment would help.

My son had gangs after him and he fought back but what would happen is they would go to the teacher once he hit back and get him into trouble.
The parents are like a gang themselves they would also like to blame my son downplay things and even say my son does not have aspergers and is badly behaved.
Lucky i had my mother to help talk to the school as its hard for me also to talk and explain what is happening. An aspergers teacher has been in and things are better the other pupils are now being ok and they know he has aspergers.
Fighting back does not always work with gangs as they seem to like the challenge of a boy who is strong and can take them all on to a certain extent, it is alot like a fox hunt the more challenging the more they like the sport.

My son has seen an ASD specialist and seems to exhibit a lot of traits and is kind of borderline AS - good eye contact, gifted at school (accelerated) with an obsessive pokemon special interest. He has some problem with more complex emotional exchanges and can be quite literal. But he is not severe and is doing ok. He is however HIGHLY sensitive and out of his depth at times and i worry about his journey in school.
He has already experienced a bit of bullying and we are actually moving him to a school the year after next where there is much more supervision of bullying behaviours and antics, than the alternative state schools in our area.

there are any number of strategies one can adopt from intervention personally through to notifying the school, through to notifying the parents of bullies.

it's a difficult and horrible scenario.
Most of all, i would do just about anything to protect my son if required. I don;t believe that cliche that kids are resilient. i think that is a kind of excuse used by adults sometimes to justify their own behaviours or lack of accountability.
My job as my son's mother is to protect him as best i can. I am not always "on the ball" when it comes to his life, but i try and that is very important to me and to him.

Takin' the home school route; my kids deserve better than the utter joke that is "public education", not to mention the joke that is "private education".

YEAH, it is a FELONY in the US to threaten! It is called assault! It is a FELONY in the US to hit someone. It is called BATTERY. Yet they don't even enforce the law with adults, much less kids.

I did fight back a few times and that didn't stop it either, plus I got in trouble in at both school and home for fighting. My parents didn't want to hear it, they said I wasn't to fight period, even if I was attacked. If I was attacked, I was to report it to school officials, that was it.

I did try reporting bullying and being hit and of course, that didn't stop it. I can remember one time I reported a kid hitting me and the person I reported to said "If I had to take care of you everytime you got hit, I'd spend my life taking care of you." He said it in front of the kid who hit me, who just laughed. This was in a private school and whoever said private school discipline is better than public school has obviously never been in one. I went to 6 different private schools and in most of the, discipline was no better or in some cases, worse than in the 1 public school I attended.

I'll still never forget the time my older sister was bragging about how she punched a kid in front of the whole class, including the teacher, and not only wasn't punished at school for it, my parents treated her like a hero for doing it. When I asked why it was OK for her and wrong for me, I just got told be quiet, to drop it, etc. This still doesn't make sense to me even now.

My parents didn't believe in punishing girls, so I guess that's why she was allowed to get away with it.