(Bullied.)

Fear/Love from Rob Chiu on Vimeo.

Three lives, three identities, three points of view. Set against the harsh backdrop of inner city London, Fear/Love interweaves the lives of three adolescents as they struggle with who they are, who they want to be and who they are becoming.

PLAYGROUP Margaret Guest, center, in striped shirt, often has groups of friends at her home in Dunwoody, Ga.

An article from the NYT by Hilary Stout titled “A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding” is creating some buzz. Here is an excerpt from it:

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. (Ms. Laycob was speaking in an interview after spending much of the previous day dealing with a “really awful” text message one girl had sent another.) Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.

The NYT has an interesting article worth noting by Benedict Carey titled “Can an Enemy Be a Child’s Friend?,” which tracks some of my own thinking. Here is an excerpt:

Almost everyone picks up a tormentor or two while growing up, and until lately psychological researchers have ignored such relationships — assuming them to be little more than the opposite of friendship.

Yet new research suggests that as threatening as they may feel, antagonistic relationships can often enhance social and emotional development more than they impede it. The relationships are not all made equal — a classroom rival is one thing, a hostile ex-friend another — and researchers say their psychological impact depends in part on how youngsters respond.

“Friendships provide a context in which children develop, but of course so do negative peer relations,” said Maurissa Abecassis, a psychologist at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. “We should expect that both types of relationships, as different as they are, present opportunities for growth.”

We wanted to link letters to the editor of the NYT regarding a recent article “6 Teenagers Are Charged After Classmate’s Suicide” titled “How to Stop Bullying in the Schools.” Here is one of the them that makes some great points and give us a plan of action:

Re “Playtime Is Over” (Op-Ed, March 27): David Elkind raises an interesting point regarding the possible relationship between the loss of playtime and the rise of bullying. The relationship seems intuitively obvious. What is not so apparent is how to replace the important normative life experiences that result from unstructured playtime.

In the “old days,” pick-up sports (stickball, stoopball, touch football) involved any child who was outside and willing to play. That meant children of all ability levels were included. As a result, good players learned tolerance, patience and acceptance from playing with weaker and perhaps younger players, and these weaker players learned skills from the better players. In different ways, each benefited from the experience.

In the absence of these spontaneously occurring opportunities for socialization, we need to develop programs that move beyond the Band-Aid approach, like the use of recess coaches.

Over the last decade, a number of “whole school” programs have been designed in which administrators, staff and teachers work together to reduce bullying among students. But perhaps it is time to expand the whole-school concept to include school-community partnerships involving community agencies and organizations like the YMCA and the Unified Sports program of Special Olympics.

Programs in which schools and community groups work together to create new recreational sports opportunities for children and youth at all levels — not just the athletically talented — are an important next step in addressing the bullying problem.

Gary N. Siperstein
Boston, March 28, 2010

The writer is director of the Center for Social Development and Education, University of Massachusetts Boston.

(Also checkout a Time article from October, 2008 we want to add to our archive of research and commentary on bullying titled “Which Kids are Most Vulnerable to Bullying?.” Find the image above here.))

Lucinda Franks has a series of must read posts at the Daily Beast about the bullying incident at South Haley High School, which led to the suicide of Phoebe Prince titled “Bullied to Death,” “Life and Death at Suicide High,” and “How to Stop a Bully.”

As a culture we expect children and adolescents to buck up and learn how to defend themselves and fight back and here lies the problem. The only response to bullies is to shut them down and contain them before they cause real harm to others. A bully must recognize that there are major consequences for their behaviors and any attempt to bully someone else will quickly be met with authority and never tolerated. Surveillance, intervention and containment are the most important steps to prevent bullying. Just think of all of these kids out there hiding in fear and shame, not feeling like they have anywhere to go to be protected from the terror that stalks them everyday. Here is an excerpt from the “How to Stop a Bully” post:

Every hour and a half, a teenager tries to take his life; many of them are incessantly persecuted by their fellow students, many are cyberbullied on Web sites. And despite efforts to change this culture of bloodlust in the schools, little has been done about it and perhaps nothing can be done.

A rash of recent suicides by bullied teens has inspired 41 states to enact anti-bullying laws but less than half of these have implemented enforceable laws that would significantly tackle the problem. Even in the few states with the strictest laws, where administrators must report every incident of bullying to the state, problem schools can often slip right through cracks in the legislation.

The bullying incident of Phoebe Nora Mary Prince, 15, of South Hadley, Mass., by several of her peers, which ultimately led to her suicide on Jan. 14 has raised national attention once again on the dangers of bullying among teenagers. We commented in previous posts about bullying, focusing in part on how parents, schools, and communities, have to be aware of who the bullies are and what strategies and consequences can be implemented to curb these behaviors. Emily Bazelon has an important post on this incident at Slate titled “Suicide in South Hadley” and the NYT has an article “9 Teenagers Are Charged After Classmate’s Suicide.” Here is an excerpt from the NYT article:

The prosecutor brought charges Monday against nine teenagers, saying their taunting and physical threats were beyond the pale and led the freshman, Phoebe Prince, to hang herself from a stairwell in January.

The charges were an unusually sharp legal response to the problem of adolescent bullying, which is increasingly conducted in cyberspace as well as in the schoolyard and has drawn growing concern from parents, educators and lawmakers.

In the uproar around the suicides of Ms. Prince, 15, and an 11-year-old boy subjected to harassment in nearby Springfield last year, the Massachusetts legislature stepped up work on an anti-bullying law that is now near passage. The law would require school staff members to report suspected incidents and principals to investigate them. It would also demand that schools teach about the dangers of bullying. Forty-one other states have anti-bullying laws of varying strength.

Find the chart above here and read the NPR post titled “Hit Back At Bullies? Not At This School.”

Witnessing violent actions and speech against others can be and is traumatizing, especially for children and adolescents who have these types of experiences on their own and out of sight from adult supervision. Schools and neighborhoods are filled with intimidation and bullying. In fact, this is where we learn to look the other way or hope that we aren’t targeted by a bully. We are in many ways encouraged to keep silent, stay out of it, step away from people who are being bullied, and to view the victims as weak because they can’t fend for themselves. It’s unfortunately rare to see an adult or child take the risk of protecting someone who is being bullied. This all leads to people getting away with violence towards and manipulation of others in our homes, workplaces, communities and politics. Power is equated with our capacity to bully others into submission. The “strong” dominate the “weak” is the credo. On this note, BPS Research Digest Blog has a post titled “Witnessing school bullying carries its own psychological risks” about a study that further examines the impact of violence on bystanders. Here is an excerpt:

We hear a lot about the harmful consequences to children of seeing their parents argue or watching violence on TV, but very little about the potential harm of witnessing school bullying. But now Ian Rivers and colleagues have published findings suggesting that being a bystander to bullying can often be just as psychologically harmful as being directly involved.

The researchers asked just over 2000, predominantly white, children aged 12-16 at 14 state schools in the north of England about how much they’d been bullied, been a bully or witnessed bullying, over the last school term. Bullying appeared to be part of the daily lives of most of the children, with 63 per cent saying they’d seen bullying going on; 20 per cent admitting that they’d bullied someone else and 34 per cent reporting they’d been bullied.

The pupils were also asked questions about their mental health and their use of cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs. The findings showed that being a witness to bullying was associated with increased mental health problems and substance abuse, above and beyond the effects of being directly involved in bullying. In other words, witnessing bullying was still significantly associated with psychological measures like anxiety and depression, even after the potential influence of being a bullying victim or perpetrator was factored out. Pupils who’d witnessed bullying (but not been a victim or bully) also tended to report drinking more alcohol than victims or those not at all involved in bullying.

(See Maureen Bond’s photostream here.)

What we witness as children in so many ways define us. Our experiences as a child where we see domestic violence and encounter bullying at our schools and in neighborhoods teaches how violence and abuse can enter our lives wounding us and others. We have posted on the power of violence and how children witnessing/experiencing violence in their own homes, schools and neighborhoods trumps any violent content they view in video games, films and on television. There are studies that demonstrate how violence and abuse in childhood shapes our development and mental health. The likelihood that we will be violent and abusive to varying degrees comes from what we went though, how we were treated and most importantly loved, when we were younger.

We will continue to highlight how the presence of real violence, abuse, and neglect in homes, schools, and communities are the primary indicators of whether someone will grow up to be violent, abusive and neglectful. As models of conduct what we do and say sets our children on their own course. Think of all of the aspects of behaviors they are watching and emulating. As sponges children take it all in, but what they do with who and what they witness and experience is distorted because they don’t have the full capacity to distinguish between right and wrong. It is our job as adults to make appropriate distinctions for and with them.

Effectively dealing with intense emotions, stress, anxiety, and fear, all precursors to violence and abuse, is what we should be showing children how to do. I know this sounds obvious, yet we do not always or often see adults modeling right conduct and/or effectively managing emotions, stress, anxiety and fear. What many children do see too much of is domestic violence, alcoholism, addiction, poor health habits, abuse, and neglect. We can do better by remembering that children depend on us to say and do what is right for them. Their future ability to succeed depends on how we cope.

(See Kurt Tutschek’s artwork here.)