Studies Reveal Why Kids Get Bullied and Rejected
toboo
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Joined: 3 Apr 2008
Age: 50
Gender: Female
Posts: 61
Location: chi-town burbs
05 Feb 2010, 1:30 pm
totally agree with janisy and pandd.
as someone who was both outright bullied as well as rejected - i see this article as having been mistitled rather than irrelevant.
upon reflecting on my experiences in grade and high school, i see now that the non-bullies, who seemed to be perfectly nice, caring people with perfectly nice, caring parents, etc.. were as perplexed by my behavior/bodylanguage/etc... as i was by theirs. i see that they would also not be able to name or put into words why they were rejecting me. i was sending signals that i didn't even know i was sending, and they had no reason to not think that those signals and the messages they attributed to them were intentional on my part.
so they thought i sat by myself at lunch for three years because i was a stuck up snob that was too good for them, so of course i was never invited to sit with them. and i was too intimidated to just go up and ask if i could sit at the table and waited and waited for them to read my mind and see how miserable i was and invite me to sit there.
what the article is pointing out is the need for parents and educators and other adults to watch for children who are rejected by their peers and at risk for even more severe bullying and to intercede. i know that i spent my childhood just wishing for someone to tell me what the heck i was doing wrong.
i can see now that the other kids were just baffled by me. i seemed nice sometimes, but when they tried to be friendly i mis-interpreted their banter and even if i hadn't, i didn't know how to respond. one girl even came up to me after graduation and apologized and said, "we thought you would just tease us back...."
and my teachers were just as confused. they were coming to the same conclusions as the kids. though they had trouble reconciling what they knew about my totally goody-two-shoes, rule following to a fault, desire to be helpful when asked self with my seemingly selfish, hurtful, distancing behavior with my peers, they couldn't come up with the idea that i could be clueless about the effects of my actions and words.
so, i don't see it as having to be a different person in order to gain social acceptance. while there was certainly plenty of cliques and conforming going on, there were other groups that had kids with all different interests and ways of dressing and what not, they seemed pretty accepting. i just needed to be made aware of things that everyone else did and saw and reacted to on an unconscious level. and it would help if they were made aware of it too.
i want to make a bumper sticker that says, "even the smartest, most well behaved child in the entire world should get in trouble for talking at least once in a while!! !!"
i think as people become aware that these nebulous "social skills" aren't always innate - teachers and parents will start to think, "this child would not bring this behavior on themselves on purpose - maybe they really are clueless as to how they are being perceived by their peers."
_________________
Toni
05 Feb 2010, 3:11 pm
I was bullied. Probably not as much as many. But I agree, that the lack of acceptance did much more damage than the bullying. I ended up with a very healthy size fear of rejection that I got to overcome. I went through a period where I wanted to reject masculinity because I felt it had rejected me, but could not reject it without rejecting myself. I got through all of this mainly by use of forgiveness as my technique, but though I feel mostly accepted by my friends now, the impact of that lack of acceptance in adolescence 40 plus years ago still effects me today.
06 Feb 2010, 3:28 pm
There you go. Early intervention, even though the kids look normal and don't seem handicapped and no one wants to not take their ability to bond with other people for granted. But on the heels of this: It's "special" education, expensive, time-consuming, and its own social stigma.
The best thing that could happen is that the parents recognize the problem, and use their knowledge of the child's unique strengths and weaknesses to help them build social skills. But parents are busy and there isn't a lot of time and even intelligent parents won't necessarily succeed in teaching a skill that they've maybe never had to think about.
07 Feb 2010, 7:13 am
Actually, the suggested kind of skills training in the article is primarily parent administered (although teachers and other adults could help also) and no more expensive than any other kind of social skills training parents ought to be providing their children with as a matter of course.
From the article
1) Ask the child what happened and listen without judgment.
2) Ask the child to identify their mistake. (Often children only know that someone got upset, but don't understand their own role in the outcome).
3) Help the child identify the cue they missed or mistake they made, by asking something like: "How would you feel if Emma was hogging the tire swing?" Instead of lecturing with the word "should," offer options the child "could" have taken in the moment, such as: "You could have asked Emma to join you or told her you would give her the swing after your turn."
4) Create an imaginary but similar scenario where the child can make the right choice. For example, you could say, "If you were playing with a shovel in the sand box and Aiden wanted to use it, what would you do?"
5) Lastly, give the child "social homework" by asking him to practice this new skill, saying: "Now that you know the importance of sharing, I want to hear about something you share tomorrow."
None of this necessitates special education or any particular stigma or expense.
Which no doubt explains why this kind of research is useful, since it provides a means of discovering the kind of information that we ought to provide parents with, so that they can identify such issues and help to provide their children with social skills in the event a child is not acquiring these in the absence of exceptional support in this area.
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