What to Do When Your Child Is a Bully

Every parent will feel terrible when they get a call from the school principal telling them that their child has just been bullied. So many things run through that parent’s mind at the time. But what about a case where their child is the bully? Knowing that your kid has the potential to make another child feel terrible and derives pleasure from doing that can be heartbreaking for most parents. Some parents, most times, don’t even believe that their kids are capable of such.
But living in self-denial is not the way to go. It’s paramount that you do something about this as soon as you can. Experts have made it clear that bullying has a psychological background.

Dr. Lamia is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who has spent 35 years teaching adults, adolescents, and preteens about dealing with behavior and emotion.

She explains that bullying is one of the most damaging childhood problems and that bullying can lead victims to actions as extreme as suicide or to permanent psychological damage.

“Bullying is a very serious issue, and parents/educators need to understand the dynamics and be prepared to help their kids in case they become either a perpetrator or victim of bullying. The first step in dealing with bullying is understanding the psychology of the bully and the motivation for their actions. Knowing what’s behind bullying behavior can help you be more effective in dealing with bullies.”, said Dr. Lamia.

One of the major misconceptions about bullying is that bullies feel bad about themselves and this is the reason why they hurt others. The prevailing belief is that deep down they feel so insecure or ashamed of themselves, and this negativity seeks an outlet in hurting others. In Dr. Lamia’s exploration of bullying, she’s found that generally speaking, that’s not how bullies operate.  If they do feel bad about themselves they are not aware of it.

Attacking others actually enables bullies to be unaware of what they really feel. They have a unique way of making others feel shame and humiliation, which is what they are hiding from themselves. They do this by intuitively recognizing a person’s insecurities and attacking them.

Attacking others not only keeps them from looking within themselves, but it also can give them a feeling of excitement or power.

Although bullies put down others in order to raise themselves up, they are not aware of how negatively they feel about themselves. Putting down others keeps them from recognizing their need to raise themselves up.  Most of them have deep-rooted feelings of shame that they are unable to address.

Now that you know more about bullies and the major reason behind why they actually bully others, let’s get down to what you can do when you find out that your child falls into this category.

What to do when you hear that your child just bullied another kid:

1. Find out what really happened

Your first natural instinct might be to get angry, but bullying expert Joel Haber, Ph.D., says parents need to keep their cool. Instead, Haber recommends asking your child to tell you, in his own words, what happened and what his role in the incident was. “Kids have to take accountability for their behavior,” says Haber. If your child tries to push the blame onto another participant, be firm and reiterate that you aren’t interested in hearing about other kids—just your child’s role in the bullying.

2. Encourage empathy with the victim

After you get your child’s side of the story, ask him to imagine himself in his victim’s shoes. How would he feel if someone did the same thing to him? “The earlier we can help kids develop empathy, the better chance we have of them not becoming a bully,” says Haber.

3. Demand that your child make restitution

Once your child owns what she did and acknowledges the hurt she’s caused, it’s time for her to try to make amends for the situation. This may mean apologizing to the other child in the presence of a school guidance counselor, or, in the case of cyberbullying, contacting all the recipients of a hurtful e-mail to issue a correction.

Barbara Coloroso, the author of “The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander,” notes the nature of the Web means that “rumors on the Internet can be hard to fix.” In extreme cases, she recommends that cyberbullies be forced to pay for a Web scrubber, which helps bury nasty Web pages in Google search results.

4. Dig deep down to get to the root of the bullying

Just because your child did something hurtful doesn’t mean that he’s a bad kid or that you’re a failure as a parent, says Ben Leichtling, Ph.D., author of “Parenting Bully-Proof Kids” and “How to Stop Bullies in Their Tracks.” Most likely it means that he’s struggling to get something he wants—acknowledgment or attention or control, for instance—and falling back on bad patterns of behavior. So try to get to the root cause of the behavior, and then brainstorm different, more positive ways to act. “One way to do that is to acknowledge, ‘Okay, those desires are normal. I want to teach you better ways of getting what you want or being popular,’” says Leichtling.

5. Get the school involved

You can’t monitor your child 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so if you believe that your child is a bully, you need to enlist the school to help keep tabs on her behavior and report back to you. “Tell the guidance counselors and the teachers that you don’t support bullying and you want to know if it occurs,” says Leichtling.

6. Be a role model

“If your kid is truly the bully, you have to examine what’s going on in your own home,” says Coloroso. So be honest with yourself: What behaviors do you model that send your child the message that it’s okay to make another person feel small? Are you curt with salespeople? Do you gossip and spread rumors? Roll your eyes when you hear something you disagree with? If so, it’s time to change—for your kid’s sake, as well as your own. “Kids observe what we do and follow what we do more than they listen to us,” says Haber. If we as parents want to stop the bullying, we all have to get on board.

Conclusion

Bullying isn’t something that should be ignored by either parents or educators. Whether your child is being bullied or he’s the bully himself, it is important that you deal with the matter as soon as you can.