Stop Bullying and Cyberbullying

Stop Bullying and Cyberbullying Welcome back to the show, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to share with me because today’s topics are big, it has turned a lot of press recently and they’ve created some dramatic and traumatic results. Of course I'm talking about bullying and its electronic brother cyberbullying. So let’s see what we cab do today, try and equip you parents with the few tools and try lessons on some of the bullying that’s happening in your community or certainly within your own home and your own child. Now there are of course the more overt sides like your child comes home with bruises complaining that somebody has beat them up. Of course you're going to take action but what actually are you going to take. Here’s idea number one, record everything. On this date my son or daughter came home with these bruises complaining about. Then you put a call into the school and you ask for the principal, you explain what you’ve seen and you record that phone call on a piece of paper. It will essentially start to create a paper trail of all of the events where your son or daughter has complained about bullying. That way you have a written record should anything more tragic happen down the line. You reported it they know and then follow up to see if you can schedule a conference with the principal and the bully in his or her parents. Getting everybody in the room together at the same is a great way to sort through any inconsistencies until we get to the heart of the matter. Don’t accept no for an answer. This is your child’s life that we’re potentially talking about. So act quickly and record it. Now, there are the less solid signs of bullying and this is typically where cyberbullying comes into play. Because there's a lot of the Facebook and MySpace and online chat messages and text messages and voicemails from anonymous callers that are also considered to be bullying anything that’s essentially a treat to your child could be considered bullying. Whether that happens by electronic means or physical or otherwise you need to take note of that. Now, how are you going to do that? Any time that something has been recorded either on a cellphone via text message or on the computer, that gives you some type of a record. So pay attention. What are you paying attention to? The monthly phone bill for one. You want to start looking for any inconsistencies. By inconsistencies I mean calls coming in late, late, late in the evening, early in the morning, calls coming from phone numbers that you don’t recognize. Ask for the full print out from your phone company and just scan it once in a while you don’t have to be over vigilant. But if you suspect based on your child’s behavior that they maybe getting bullied that is one place that you're going to want to look. And then of course as advocated in the past, you should be a friend on your child’s Facebook. If that is not happening, you need to make it happen. I have whole set of video series on that but as advice to say if you have access to your child’s Facebook page that gives you the opportunity to scan those every once in a while just to make sure that no one is posting anything there of a bullying nature. If there were indeed the case then you would print that page, now you have a written record. So that way if they will remove it at a later date you have a printed record that says indeed there was some bullying that happens. So in both cases the overt and the more subtle the cyberbullying, you're trying to create a written record so that way you have that in the future should anything worse start to happen. The key idea here folks is we need to report it. Now finally I want to show some tips for the kids because bullying is something that typically happens on school campus or when parents or other adults are not around. So how do you handle that? Idea number one, travel in groups; whenever possible go with at least one friend. It becomes harder to bully a child when they are with a group of people. More than one that makes it difficult for a bully to do his work. I do say he because most of the time, but we see a lot of girls these days as well. Tip number two; report it as much as I said it’s important for the parents to report it, it’s important for the kids to report it as well. Go to your nearest adult and let them know what has happened. Tip number three and this is a big one; you have to be able to confront the bully and say not acceptable or something to that effect. Hey this is just not working. You need to stop. That takes a lot of courage; it takes a lot of practice. If you do suspect that your child is being bullied, one of the strategies that works well for parents and kids is to sit down and role play. You're the bully, your son or daughter plays the role of themselves and you work through the conversation. How would you respond if a bully were to say or do? That way when the moment arise the reaction is hey you need to stop now and then you follow up that up with the reporting and the whole procedure goes and goes. So a couple of tips for parents, a couple of tips for kids. I'm also going to post links below the video today the three simple articles that I've written on the topic so hopefully there are a lot of resources for you. Looking ahead in the calendar, next month’s conference call 20 minutes, Tuesday May 11 at 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern Cyberbullying expert. He’s written a book, an author who’s going to share his expertise over the course of that 20-minute call, so you definitely want to put that on the calendar. Come back to thinkingforwardtv.com to find out more information. Have a wonderful day.