9 Ways to Preclude Your Child from Becoming a Bully
As we continue with our theme of addressing bullying during National Bullying Prevention Month, here are nine good tips on how to raise children who don’t bully others. Just as we do at our intentionally empowering summer camp for girls and summer camp for boys, as parents or adults working with children, we can focus on concrete strategies to help them develop into aware, compassionate beings who can be resistant to the potential lure of being a bully.
Sociologist and child development coach Christine Carter shares some of these during this 12-minute podcast at this link. For those of us who are more visual learners, the main takeaways are as below:
- Teach your kids empathy, i.e. how their actions affect others. Help them recognize how being the recipient of meanness can hurt someone for a lifetime.
- Help children understand their own emotions and feelings to build their emotional intelligence. The more basic literacy they have regarding emotions in general and their own emotions, the more in touch they will be with understanding how their actions affect others.
- Know your children’s friends and pay attention to the values of those children. Listen to the language those friends’ use and how they talk about other children.
- Help your kids learn how to express their negative feelings—especially anger or powerlessness—without hurting other people. Help them learn the difference between feeling bad and acting badly by modeling that for them.
- Help your children recognize the things they can do that will calm themselves down. How can your kids self-soothe?
- Positively recognize your kids when they are coping appropriately with negative feelings.
- Don’t make excuses for your child’s misbehavior. (I.e. “she’s really tired” or “he’s just in a bad mood”. Let’s be okay with realizing our kids are not perfect but not excuse the bad behavior.
- Make sure that we’re teaching concrete ways for children to feel powerful in their relationships without being mean. We can facilitate that by helping them be in situations where they feel they are contributing to something larger than themselves and helping people around them.
- Pay attention to make sure we’re not bullying children, i.e. calling them names, using shame or humiliation, or lying to them or manipulating them to get what we want as adults.