Some programs are based solely on enlisting the help of student bystanders. Reason Number Five: Teaching kids how to recognize bullies Many anti-bully programs involve teaching kids how to recognize bullies, and may have the students conduct sociograms to identify their classmates who are bullies. Reason Number Six: Trying to create a completely safe school environment The federal mandate today is to create a completely safe school environment.
The US Department of Education in August declared the goal of eliminating bullying from schools. Children cannot concentrate when they live in fear of bullies, and they deserve a school environment free of fear. Therefore, it is our responsibility to provide them with a completely safe school environment.
Many schools are eliminating recess and shortening lunch periods to prevent the chance of children hurting each other. While it may be impossible to prevent all negative consequences, there is a way of minimizing them.
The best way is by using good psychology. First, this requires us to stop promoting the popular but irrational and harmful belief that schools are responsible for providing kids with a completely safe environment, for such a belief can only lead to hostility between the school and parents. Secondly, we need to function as mental health professionals rather than law enforcement officers. We promote mental health not by protecting people from problems but by teaching them how to solve their problems on their own.
The reason for the failure of an anti-bullying program may be any one or more of the following: Reason Number One: Instructing students to inform the school staff when bullying happens. Good Intention: We adults need to be informed about the bullying so that we can get involved to make it stop. Unintended Negative Consequences: Having kids tell the authorities can only be helpful if the authorities actually know how to make the bullying stop.
Without effective techniques, the reporting will have no benefit or cause more harm than good. The best legal way to get people to despise you is to tell on them to the authorities. Then I tell the teacher, who proceeds to send you to the principal for bullying me. Is that going to make you like me, respect me and want to be nice to me? Of course not. You will hate me and think of me as a wimp or a punk. You will want to beat me up after school. You will try to get other kids against me. You will try to make me look like scum on Facebook.
You will look for opportunities to tell on me and get me in trouble for bullying you. Therefore, future incidents—and probably worse incidents—are almost certain to ensue. For kids to be able to deal with social difficulties, they need to develop self-confidence and self-esteem. Encouraging kids to tell adults when they are bullied gives them the message that they are not capable of handling the situation by themselves, a message that erodes their self-confidence and -esteem.
People find it convenient to have someone else take care of their difficulties for them. So rather than try to figure out how to deal with bullying on their own, some kids will gladly delegate this job to the school staff.
Thus, any program that relies upon students informing adults about bullying is de facto limited in its ability to help. Good Intentions: We want to teach kids that it is important to be nice to each other. A moral society requires that people be punished by the legal authorities for all bad behavior. Unintended Negative Consequences: Researchers have discovered that punishing children is a poor way of getting them to behave better.
Both the American Psychological Association and the National Association of School Psychologists have issued research-based position papers advising against punitive approaches to discipline, explaining the myriad ways in which punishment causes more harm than good.
If punishment for discipline infractions is counterproductive, it is likely to be counterproductive for bullying as well. Some kids will, indeed, stop engaging in bullying behavior in order to avoid punishment. However, when punished, many kids will get angry not only with the kids who got them in trouble but also with the school staff for punishing them.
They are likely to want revenge and to do something even worse. This creates a cycle of increasingly serious incidents and punishments. In the long run, children will learn to behave the way we do. We want to teach them to be nice to people. Teenagers who do bully choose to ignore anti-bullying lessons. They may turn the lessons into a joke to criticize them so that the lessons seem silly to other teens. According to scholarly research, teachers are the main individuals who students listen to and can cause an anti-bullying program to succeed.
They are role models, spend quality time with their students, and students are more likely to respect them. Research shows that principals, staff members, and other administrators aren't perceived in the same way as teachers to their students. Because students hold teachers in such high regard, this means they have to be the leaders to teach children to not bully. Many programs don't focus on the importance of teachers leading to anti-bullying program failures.
Also, not all schools can afford training for all teachers to learn how to handle the issue of bullying. Without proper training, teachers may handle situations wrongly or ineffectively. Ferguson, Age, gender, culture, socioeconomic status, and other factors may influence the social structure of a school. When developing anti-bullying programs, all these factors and others must be taken into account to ensure lessons students will be taught and how they are taught will be effective.
Like I mentioned before with teenagers, anti-bullying programs that are effective with younger children don't work with teenagers. Because there is a lack of research examining what anti-bully programs work and which don't, it is difficult to figure out what kinds of programs different schools should use. Right now we live in a time where bullying is a focus of educators.
Because most anti-bullying programs are new and being developed, more research needs to be done to figure out what works and what doesn't to develop better programs that don't waste time or school resources. Crothers, L. School Psychology International. Ferguson, C.
Criminal Justice Review 4 32, Smith, J. School Psychology Review, 33 4 , This content reflects the personal opinions of the author. Social Issues. We live in an era where the news features name calling in the political arena, name calling as part of the sports culture, and sports commentators give athletes demeaning nick-names.
When a congressman publicly calls the president a "tar baby" it shouldn't be hard to see where kids get it from. Therefore, it's important for educators, parents, and other grownups to show kids that bullying and name calling by adults is just as bad as when it's enacted by youth. While the 5 reasons outlined above are by no means the solution to the bullying problem, they give us a place to start on how to effectively address it.
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