The first thing I would like to say is that anyone who thinks this generation has upped the bar on bullying wasn’t bullied, not severely.
It reminds me of my ex who used to say that girl bullying was worse than boy bullying because girls did this social ex-communication thing and had whisper campaigns. That they attacked your self-esteem and left you not knowing if you were going to face attacks.
Of course, I was coming from the perspective of someone who was beaten on a daily basis, had to crawl on my hands and knees through an abandoned lot on my way home in order to survive school. It’s not like the whisper campaigns didn’t happen. Of course they did, it’s just that it was so much worse than that.
In our day we got to leave it at school when we went home?
My bullies dug up my dead cat and left it on my doorstep. Teach me to bury a cat in my back yard. My bullies followed me home, lived close to me, sometimes waited for me outside my door. When they found me they beat me. Held me down on the ground and punched me until I bled.
Am I saying that kids today have it better? No, I’m not. I’m saying that it was always bad and that treating it like some sort of new problem just shows that it wasn’t something you understood completely when you were young.
The solution isn’t to monitor their online communication, for starters that will only work for a limited time. Kids will find a way around any form of monitoring that you can manage. They will evolve and improve until you can’t keep up. I worked in network security and my son taught me things that I didn’t know.
The solution is to build up your children. Build their self-esteem, their belief in themselves, but build it in a real way. Don’t give them participation trophies, give them real skills. Challenge them at a level they can reach, reward them when they succeed. Don’t make them the star athlete, because that isn’t who everyone is, but give them a chance to become who they are. Work with their skills, work with what makes them tick and give them the gift of actual accomplishment.
When you have real accomplishment you don’t worry as much about what people think.
