Cook: What are the best tools for parents? For kids?
Bazelon: For parents, here is a list of resources I’ve put together. And here’s a list for kids!
The essential point is this: The most important thing we can do about bullying, as a society, is to foster empathy and resilience in kids. This is a key insight at the heart of every good bullying prevention or character education effort. Most kids do feel or can learn to feel empathy and remorse. It’s our job to help them find that capacity within themselves, and build on it. And without minimizing the devastating impact bullying can have on some kids, most recover from it. We need to remember that kids have to confront some adversity, and learn to roll with it, in order to grow.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
Rights & Permissions
See what we're tweeting about
6 Comments
Add CommentWhat about bullying in the workplace? What about (if there are any) legitimate uses of intimidation, humiliation or persecution - of individuals involved in organizations promoting terrorism, for instance. We, as a society, have this ambivalence towards violence and I think bullying merely reflects that ambivalence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article is valuable, but, while it mentions some groups who are targeted with discriminatory bullying, doesn't focus on confronting discrimination as a whole (sizeism, looks discrimination, sexist harassment, etc.), nor on the crucial role of training students to be allies against meanness and discrimination. So, this article misses the essential social pyschological point: allies need allies to be allies (see especially the research done on the KiVa project in Finland, http://www.kivaprogram.net/evidence-of-effectiveness). I almost agree with the important conclusion: "The most important thing we can do about bullying, as a society, is to foster empathy and resilience in kids." Yes we need to focus on that, and teach all of us to use our empathy and resilience to ally with each other in order to create more inclusive communities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article seems (to me at least) to victimize the bullies just as much. I can only but disagree.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA bully is not a victim. They are just people who enjoy tormenting others, and yes, that had happened to me (often with the approval and/or encouragement of my teachers) in my suburbian, middle class elementary school where we have not even heard of any sort of crime at all.
If I may suggest, science should be focusing on how to teach young people NOT to bully others, rather than finding the way to justify bullying...
I agree this just seems to permit the justification of bullying. Reading only served to depress me more and fear for those currently experiencing what I went through as a child and in the workplace.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe can't expect that all parents are going to teach their children that bullying is wrong. We need to teach against bullying in the schools. Any adult who sees bullying and doesn't step in to say something is as guilty as the bully. Teachers, library personnel, lot's of adults witness bullying and say nothing. I consider them guilty.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would use the Ludoviko treatment from "A Clockwork Orange" on the bullies, adjusting them to react to pop music.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand, as said before, sometimes teachers encourage bullies because that removes work from them, a unrully student who asks a lot of questions and makes the class go slower is a prime target for this.
Truth is that empathy and conformism required by traditional teaching system are antagonic.
Perhaps this shows another trend, as said in the article, the physically weaker boys and more submissive girls are the target, that sounds like a monkey troupe establishing hierarchy, hooray for the human condition!
(awaiting for Skynet to rise and take over the world)