Whether on the playground or in the workplace, people are confronted each day with what Skaneateles school counselors Ro Brennan and Kelly Bonner call “difficult personalities.”
Brennan and Bonner talked to about 15 parents who braved the negative temperatures on Jan. 15 at Waterman Elementary School about bullies, what makes them tick and how each parent can teach their children to be assertive.
“They tend to be personalities that need to be in control,” Brennan said, adding that bullies are very demanding and while personality may often be genetic, cruelty and unkindness is garnered from the environment a child grows up in.
What is a bully? Brennan describes them as people who have a desire to hurt others.
“They enjoy that power over the other person,” she said.
Why do bullies act out toward others? Not only does it get them what they want, Brennan said bullies tend to have a low level of empathy as well.
“They tend to be prejudice,” she said. “They have had aggressive role models. They believe the victim provoked the negative treatment.”
While every parent wants to ultimately protect their child or children from harm and the cruel people they will come across in life, they need to learn to be courageous, and children regularly learn from how they see their parents act and react in situations.
“We need to be very conscious of what we do because our children are aware of it,” Brennan said.
In helping parent learn how to handle a bully, Bonner spoke to them about courage and how to build courage in each child. Every moment that a child exudes fear is also a “teachable moment,” one in which parents can talk to their kids and work with them to learn how to be assertive in the face of a bully instead of afraid of them.
To be courageous, though, is something that has to be worked on continuously, Brennan said.
“We need to teach our children now to be in control of our emotions when dealing with a difficult personality,” Brennan said.
By having control over their emotions, children can also have control over the message they are trying to send to their bully. In order to learn how to control their emotions, Brennan said she uses simple exercises such as deep breathing she calls “belly breathing,” counting anything from numbers to visualized ice cream cones, a method called “hook up” that uses dexterity and concentration to help the body relax, also called “brain gym.”
When coming face to face with a bully, Bonner said there are three styles of responding — aggressive, passive and assertive. Aggressive response is when the person yells, calls names and can be physically aggressive, and that’s how they respond to any confrontation.
The passive person is “wishy washy” and “they don’t look you in the eye,” Bonner said. “They will do things even is they know it’s the wrong thing to do.”
Being assertive means expressing your feelings but with respect to others. An assertive person also isn’t afraid to stand up for himself or herself.
“You can teach people how to do that, but it takes courage,” Bonner said.
She said when your child stands up to a bully and asserts themselves, stroke the situation to make them proud of having the courage to do so.
An assertive person also is calm and collected, and their body language shows it. Skills that can be taught to children when faced with a bully are to stand up straight, look the person in the eye and talk to them in a firm, steady voice. The easiest thing to teach them to say in a situation like that is what Bonner calls the “I” Message:
I feel ____________
When you __________
Please ________
Typically the message reads something like “I feel hurt when you pick on me. Please don’t do it again.”
Brennan said if parents are having trouble with a bully picking on or abusing their child, don’t wait to say something. Call the school’s counseling office and let them know.
“If we don’t know about it, we can’t do anything about it,” she said. “If you don’t do anything about it, it will continue.”
Brennan and Bonner recommend parents looking for a place to start in their search to end bullying to pick up “Stick up for yourself” by Gershen Kaufman, Ph.D., Lev Raphael, Ph.D., and Pamela Espeland and “How to handle a bully” by Susanna Palomares and Dianne Schilling.
