bullying Tag

Posts tagged 'bullying'

Domestic Violence is Devastating. We Need to Stop It!

As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected almost every part of our daily life. Work, school and social engagements were adjusted to follow the restrictions. But the most troubling change is the huge increase in domestic violence all around the world.

Domestic violence has been damaging our society in more ways than COVID-19 ever will. But no one thinks we should shut down schools, states, airlines, restaurants, gyms or businesses until we eradicate it from our society. And we’re going to pay for this long after COVID-19 is gone.

Domestic violence is primarily directed at women and children. Why? Because they are more vulnerable.

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How to Stop Bullying with Empathy: The Story of Two Apples

Bullying is an epidemic. It touches every part of our life and children are very vulnerable to bullying, because they do not have the tools to prevent it.

From the bully’s point of view, bullying is an act of fear. When the bullies feels inferior for some reason, they search for someone weak to pick on, in an attempt to feel better about themselves. Therefore, the best way to prevent bullying is to develop confidence and for children, this is still work in progress (it is work in progress for grownups too, but children are just at the beginning of this process).

What we need to change the world from bullying to respect and collaboration is empathy. As parents and educators, we can develop empathy in easy and effective ways.

This post is part 35 of 35 in the series Bullying

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Why Anti-Bullying Videos are Useless (even Bad)

Stop Bullying Now! written on a stop sign

A friend of mine, who is an author and writing about teaching kids empathy and compassion, asked me for my opinion on the role of anti-bullying videos in shifting attitudes towards bullying. Here is my answer.

I believe that many anti-bullying campaigns may reinforce bullying, rather than helping to stop or prevent bullying. Most of the anti-bullying videos show stories of victims being bullied, feeling bad, sad and rejected, and how a change of attitude makes them feel better.

My question is, “If kids (and not just kids) could put themselves in their victims’ shoes, they would never bully anyone. What is the point of showing them a video that tries to put them in others’ shoes?”

Well, there is no point!

People bully because they are weak and they do not have any other way that they could think of that could give them strength and power other than bullying others. They have seen someone around them do it – someone has done it to them or they have watched thousands of videos in which verbal, physical or emotional bullying is just a common (“normal”) thing and part of everything they see around them. So by showing another video of bullying, we show them how common it is, instead of showing them that the opposite is more common (“normal”). Campaigns need to focus on good relationships, caring and sharing to give kids the message that “kind = strong” and that “bully = weak”.

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Love without Boundaries: Watch this Inspiring Video

Love without boundaries - black man and pregnant white woman holding heart shaped hands

We learn about love from the second we are born. We are not always aware of the love around us, but it is always there – love without boundaries.

Some say that love is the energy that feeds us throughout life – it is food for our soul, and without it, we are doomed to die.

There have been many songs written about love. One of the interesting things about it is that most people learn to appreciate the love they took for granted when it is under threat or when it is tested.

On the flip-side, there is hatred and discrimination. For the last 8 years, I have been very active in the field of diversity education. I was sad to discover that there was a lot of discrimination and labeling, lots of bullying and bias towards others. And this was coming from children who simply cannot deal with others’ being different from them.

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The Want Muscle

Sometimes being yourself is scary until you stop and remember everybody in the whole wide world is scared about the exact same thing

Magda came to see me after 16 years of heartache and pain. She was referred by a client of mine. She had seen psychologists and psychiatrists before, but felt very criticized and had never gone for a second session with any of them.

When I finally got to meet her, I was a bit surprised. She was in her early fifties and looked amazing – almost like a doll. She was tiny and very well presented with beautiful skin.

Yet, during the first 10 minutes of introductions, she managed to say only bad things about herself. The gist of them was that she was not good enough, unworthy and helpless. She said 27 bad things about herself in those 10 minutes. I counted!

This made me very curious about her because at that point we had just met and I knew nothing about her.

Coaching is very much like solving a puzzle. I tried to gather information that would allow me to help Magda in a way that the other therapist could not. As it turns out, Magda was an only child, born to very old parents. Her dad died when she was very young and her mom never had another man in her life.

This post is part 10 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Abusive Parenting Cycle

Recently, I wrote a post about parents who justify their bad parenting style by claiming they are better than their own parents. Parenting like this creates a cycle: bad parenting, leads to difficult children, who become bad parents, who raise difficult children, etc. Over the last 28 years, I have dedicated my work to breaking this cycle. To helping kids through helping their parents.

Last week, this topic came up again when I met a 16-year-old girl who came for teen coaching. I sat in front of her for almost 2 hours and was shocked at how mature and aware she was. She was sitting in the same balcony in which I have seen many grownups who did not understand half of the things she did. Last year, I started writing a fictional story about a girl with parent problems and anorexia. In front of me was this most beautiful, good looking girl with a similar story. It amazed me to discover that the story is so much worse when you see it in real life.

She was a 16 year old, living with abusive parents, who believed they were better than their own parents, because unlike them, they did not use physical violence. It surprised me that they sent her for life coaching though. It seemed very contradictory to what a controlling and abusive parent would do. Never-the-less, I asked about her grandparents to get a better picture. Things became crystal clear: they had been abusive parents, who raised abusive kids, who become abusive parents. This cycle would go on and on unless this troubled, 16 year old teen could stop the cycle with her awareness (if she survived the emotional abuse).

This post is part 11 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Shaming Kids: Good Parenting or Not?

From time to time, I hear or read about parents who shame their kids in public as a way to “teach them a lesson”. I think Shaming kids is a very bad idea.

Shame is one of the most debilitating feelings. It can make people, young and old do horrible things. Many grownups I work with are trying to overcome a combination of guilt and shame which is impacting their lives. These feelings are born in childhood, when parents use this combination as an incentive, thinking, “If I shame you enough, you will feel guilty and the guilt and shame will prevent you from doing it next time”.

I grew up in a house that thought where shaming kids and using guilt were major tools in the parenting tool box. If parenting practices are the tools, my parents used a hammer. Yet my parents grew up with parents of their own who used this hammer as an educational tool. They thought that if they just didn’t hit it as hard as their parents did, that makes them better parents. Their attitude was, “I am better than my parents” because of this. As a child, when a hammer hits your head (metaphorically speaking), the thought that your parents had their heads hit harder does not make the pain go away. Funnily enough, telling me how much shame and guilt they felt growing up did nothing to ease the pain either.

As a child, I was ashamed of my grades. My parents thought that shaming me would make me want to do better at school, but rather than working harder, I diverted all my energy away from learning and succeeding and towards hating them for it.

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Social Media Reality: Look Up! What Are You Missing?

Technology and social media have become a significant part of our life. Recently, I learned some valuable lessons about just how they affect us and the opportunities they make us miss.

My 13-year-old daughter, Noff, is the youngest in our family. Lately, she has been struggling with not having a mobile phone to take to school. To her, mobile phones are very cool. Some kids need them to coordinate pick-up times or for safety on the bus.

Unfortunately for her, she does not need it for any of those things. She so much wants to be part of the mobile phone in-crowd that she uses our old phones to play games. She struggles with not being like everyone else and I struggle with my parenting.

I have some beliefs and rules about social media and I know I need to adjust them to suit the times. I have three kids and I cannot apply the same parenting rules regarding media with Noff that I did with my first two.

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Never Mind Why

Often, particularly when things do not go our way, we ask, “Why?” Why did something happen to us, why did someone say something hurtful to us, why a friend was late, why our boss looks so upset and why life is not fair?

If you stop for a second, close your eyes and say to yourself, “Why? Why? Why?” you will quickly feel the misery creeping up on you and your energy sinking. Asking why brings you down. It is because this question is about the past, about something you did not understand and in most cases, you can never truly understand anyway.

The thing is you do not have to understand everything in order to live a productive and happy life. What you really have to do is decide what to do about it. So a better question is, “Now what?”

Sigmund Freud was one of the most important figures in the field of psychology and the creator of Psychoanalysis. For many years, all around the world, psychologists and psychiatrists spent their time trying to discover why their patients thought and behaved the way they did. Treatments were very long, which made them expensive and thus not available to everyone. They were often very painful emotionally, which made people stop them after a while.

Then Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) came along and provided quick ways to recover from issues, boost confidence and otherwise improve people’s emotional state without long and painful treatments. NLP does not dwell on the reasons. Instead, it quickly identifies where the person is, where they want to be, and then “reprograms” their thought patters to achieve that.

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School Horror: Untouchable

School was not one of the best periods in my life. I have become a teacher in hope of making a different in the lives of the many children like I was who are not very good in their studies, have few or no friends and struggle.

It is hard for people to imagine this, but for some kids, school is a big struggle for survival. This struggle is carried with them for years to come, even when those kids become parents themselves. When I talk to my clients about the negative beliefs they have about themselves, I discover that many of them were formed in school, when other kids said nasty things that they had no way of overcoming. I understand this very well, because I was the same. It took me a long time get over it and what really helped me was moving from primary school to middle school.

In 1st Grade, I was not a very popular girl. If there was a hierarchy in class, I was at the bottom of it, with 2 other kids that had their own problems. I loved going to school, because my teacher was the angel for me. She was soft and understanding and always treated me nicely, but the other kids never wanted to play with me.

When I did not come to school, it was very hard for my teacher to get one of the kids to come over and give me the homework (although some kids lived in my neighborhood). In the morning, when we had to stand in pairs in front of the classroom door, I was always left at the end and the child that had to give me his hand did this it in disgust. Although my teacher was very kind to me, I was always alone. Every year, until the end of primary school, when the end of year came and my class gave a performance, I stood at the back, holding a sign or something, by myself.

Was I maybe just not a friendly girl?

This post is part 3 of 3 in the series School Horrors

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