Children often ignore bullying because they don‘t know how to deal with it or feel pressured to remain silent. To deal with bullying properly, they need to feel safe in talking about it. Children also need to feel safe when reporting bullying, recognize bullying and know it’s not okay. As a parent, dealing with bullying, you need to provide your child with the skills to stamp it out.
Providing Children With Skills To Prevent Bullying
When it comes to your child’s well being, it’s important to talk to them about bullying. Discuss how sharing, including others, and treating others with respect can help avoid bullying. Reading books like Nuff’s Bullying Isn’t Nice and watching movies where someone overcomes bullying can be good conversation starters.
To avoid being bullied, let your child know they should treat others with respect and not believe what bullies say. Encourage them to discuss their concerns and experiences with bullying if any. If you had a bullying experience, sharing this with your child will help them open up about their own experiences.
Children love to role-play. A great way to teach them how to deal with bullying incidents, their continual feelings of anger towards others, and develop empathy for others is through role-playing. Walk-through bullying scenarios that may occur to them at school, at the playground, or online. Discuss how they might overcome those particular scenarios and act a few out with them.
Sometimes Children Need Help
Don’t leave it all up to your child though. When bullying happens, talk to the authorities where the bullying took place. Discuss their policies and procedures dealing with bullying. Let the authorities know what is happening, so they can monitor the situation and mitigate it in the future.
Bullying is a serious issue that can leave lifelong scars. Instead of ignoring it, you can teach your child to address it head-on and deal with bullying properly. Talk to your child; listen to them, and roleplay different scenarios to help them learn about dealing with bullying and what they can do about it.
To learn more about bullying and see how Nuff deals with it, check out his latest adventure Bullying Isn’t Nice. Join him as he finds out the pros and cons of being on both sides of the bullying spectrum and why making friends is better.
