Bullying: A Family's Journey

Bullying is defined as "intentional aggressive behavior, which can take the form of physical or verbal harassment and involves an imbalance of power."

Bullying behavior includes but is not limited to: teasing, insulting someone, shoving, hitting, excluding someone or gossiping about someone. 

To many of us adults, we most likely look at this and say, this happens every day and we shrug it off. Well, the problem is we are adults. I am sure many of you have written a post to a thread, and then had aggressive behavior, teasing, insulting, or some other form of written abuse, written back at you. I know I did over the past few months on Patch and as an adult we learn how to handle those bullies and their bully comments.

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We learn as adults that bullying is a form of trying to “own you, one-up you, put you in your place” and in most cases involves someone who does not have strong confidence or self-worth, thus reaches out from behind the social media curtain and uses this to his/her advantage.  But what about children? What really happens to them and how to teach our next generation what this creates.

Studies will tell you this causes the victim to feel upset, afraid, ashamed, embarrassed, anxious, to lose confidence, deteriorate one's self-worth, all from the simple fact that a child wants to be the overall power kid. Normally it is because in my humble opinion, the child being bullied has something, which the bully doesn’t have, and normally that is a strong self-worth and big heart. The bully needs to tear down the strong one to prove to themselves, they have complete domination over him/her.

When I was young, I was a victim of bullying. We didn’t call it bullying back then, we were told it was just kids being kids. But today, those words I hear to all kids’ sends chills up my spine. Four-Eyes, Dumbo (because I did have ears that did not fit my head), poor kid has to wear bobo shoes and tough skin jeans, and the best, you couldn’t hit a barn if it was standing next to you. All things embedded into my mind on a daily basis by bullies.

The only way I got away from it was by telling myself every day I was better than them and ultimately moving away from the area I lived in. My parents really did not know the extent of it because I hid it and when we moved I was away from it, starting a new life in a new area, some 650 miles away. You see, bullying never stops and is repeated frequently, until there is intervention. My intervention was moving. You never realize the extent of such damage until you get older and have children on your own and watch it first-hand.

I have become engaged on many levels as it relates to bullying because our family has endured bullying for the better part of six years. It is a journey that I would not wish on my own enemy, but is a journey that I must write about to help others understand. I want parents to learn, your kids, as well as mine, can be bullies. Today’s social media has created an area of bullying that no one is properly trained on how to deal with. Facebook, Twitter, SmartPhones, Angry Birds, chat rooms, they are filled with people bullying on a daily basis and unfortunately it is never known because parents don’t always take an active role in reviewing their kids' technology. Kids are smart, they figure out how to hide it, how to delete those text messages, and most importantly how to manipulate us parents.

Over the coming weeks I hope to share with you some aspects of what my sons’ life has become like, as well as our family's, because of the bullying he has endured. I know there are families out there who have endured the same as us and my hope is that by sharing maybe we can all help the community understand it is not kids being kids. It is a destructive behavior which sets a child’s long-term emotion and physical plan in play. It has everlasting effects on the victim and can take years of therapy to unwind. I know there will be parents out there who will blow this off, and say "Grow up, man, kids are kids, teach them to be strong," but remember, bullying starts as a learned trait, and therefore all of us must look ourselves in the mirror and determine do we do any of those items above which would lead us to be a bully ourselves.