The previous post of the bullying series talked about stopping bully parents with awareness, because awareness is the first step towards any change. The following posts will show how we can stop bully parents by introducing personal development.

I believe that happy parents raise happy kids and that parents with good emotional skills raise children with good emotional skills, so this will also stop many kids from being bullies and others from being victims.

In the next 10 anti-bullying posts, I will list more than 50 bullying items and expand on some personal development technique to overcome some bullying behavior or help your kids stop being bullies or victims. Consider this your free parent coaching course to recognize, avoid and eliminate bullying from their life.

Some bullying behaviors are much more severe than others, but this activity is not meant to judge you or any other parent. It is there to give you tools to overcome snappy, fearful, aggressive or manipulative behaviors that arise from feeling powerless.

It will help you regain personal power so you do not try to get this power from abusing your kids, your partner or your employees (remember, every bully is also a victim and even if you are feeling like a victim, you may be bullying others).

Read How to Stop Parental Bullying (2) »

In the last chapter of the bullying series, I wrote about bully parents (some people call them toxic parents) and although I think there is sometimes a fine line between carrying out our parenting responsibility and bullying, there is no doubt that bullying is a cycle that will never end unless we help parents stop it.

Yes, we have law enforcement officers whose job is making sure it does not continue, but if parents stop bullying their kids from fear of the police or the authorities, it will only increase their sense of disempowerment. Their focus will be again on gaining power without the authorities’ knowledge, which will create another cycle of making kids afraid of reporting and worse, hiding their physical injuries and hurts from others. This reduces the support structure available to bullied children and the chances of stopping the bullying or recovering from it.

Parents must stop the bullying cycle not because of the fear of being caught, but because they have gained power and understanding through developing their emotional intelligence. This way, the parents will be happy too.

We must stop the cycle of bullying so that in 10 years, we will talk about it as history and say, “This is what people did in the past, but we are more civilized and in control and we are better parents for our children”. We need to be proud of making a difference.

In this post, I want to help parents discover if they were bullied themselves when they were young and if there is a form of bullying in their home towards their own children.

Read How to Stop Parental Bullying »

Bullying parents are a very dangerous phenomenon in our society, because parents are supposed to be the people who protect their kids from bullying. Yet, as I have described in previous chapters, there are many parents who feel weak and lack the emotional intelligence to maintain a sense of control without bullying someone else. Being smaller and weaker makes kids easy targets for them.

Why are there bully parents?

Parents bully their kids because they have been bullied themselves as children or they are being bullied by someone else (often severely or continuously for a long time – see Workplace Bullying). This creates a never-ending cycle of parents who bully their kids, causing them to grow up and bully their own kids (and other people at work) and so on.

Often, people who have been bullied as children do not realize that their behavior is bullying. When you grow up in a place where bullying is the norm, you accept it as part of life and behave accordingly.

I am sure you have gone to a friend’s home many times and discovered that they ran things differently, which questioned the way things are done in your family. In the past, aggressive behavior, physical violence and abuse of power were part of daily life – kids were physically beaten at school with a cane or denied food or sleep as part of a discipline method that was totally controlled by their parents.

When kids are bullied at home and have never learned ways to resolve conflicts peacefully, they react in an aggressive way when things seem to get out of control with their own kids. Had they lived in a home where the parents set a good example of conflict resolution, they would have developed healthy ways to handle challenges and difficulties.

Read Bully Parents »