What can parents do?
As a parent, you can certainly lobby for anti bullying efforts in your children’s schools. But it may be even more effective to begin at home with some education about emotions and behaviors your kids will experience when you are not around to protect them.
Here are three ways you, as a parent, can fight bullying at home.
1. Understand, acknowledge, and stand up to bullying behavior in the family.
Understanding the emotional dynamics of teasing and bullying, how it makes us feel, and why it is almost unavoidable can be an important part of emotional intelligence training for children that begins as soon as they are talking. They will need words to describe the “bad” feeling of shame that happens when they are teased or bullied past the point of their own confidence.
Since this is likely to happen at home in the struggle between siblings, but also in the interaction between adults and children, there are opportunities to recognize and label this feeling. Recognizing and labeling the feeling and the behavior causing the feeling is the first step in figuring out an effective way to respond, rather than just reacting to your feelings, which often leads to the urge to retaliate.
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