BULLYING AND RESPONSIBLE PARENTING

We have all heard multiple news stories this week about the four-year old in Ohio who fell into the gorilla compound at the Cincinnati Zoo. Thankfully, the child was rescued without serious injury. Sadly, a much-beloved silverback male gorilla was killed in order to retrieve the child.

While the story itself is deeply disturbing, what has most bothered me is the degree of vitriol expressed towards the parents, and in particular, the mother of the child. Any number of examples can be found in the comments following the You Tube video of the child inside with compound with the gorilla or any of the videos of the news reports. Some of the comments are not only hateful, but vulgar and will not be quoted here. Check it out for yourself.

This has me thinking about bullying in general and cyberbullying in particular. It seems to me that as a society we have been wringing our collective hands over bullying by teenagers. This has led to many positive moves, including schools adopting zero tolerance anti-bullying policies and educational programs to curb bullying amongst school children.

Out of curiosity, I Googled the term “cyberbullying” and found this definition at a website called www.stopcyberbullying.org - "‘Cyberbullying’ is when a child, preteen or teen is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child, preteen or teen using the Internet, interactive and digital technologies or mobile phones.”

I was genuinely surprised at this definition. It seems to me that adults engage in cyberbullying as well, and many of the comments made publicly on Twitter, Facebook pages, and in comments on You Tube and online news outlets regarding the gorilla incident are ample evidence. These are not comments reflecting well-thought out consideration of the conditions that led to the child’s mishap, how parents might be more vigilant, or how the zoo might have prevented the death of the gorilla. These comments are simply mean, hateful attacks based on an apparent need to judge, blame and hurt. I respectfully suggest that we, as adults, start practicing what we preach to our children. If we want to raise kind, caring, thoughtful and compassionate adults, we need to start acting with those qualities ourselves.

Adults bully also. Our children learn from our behavior. We chastise our children for name- calling and making fun of other children based on physical appearance. Yet, a huge number of Americans are supporting a candidate who engages in name-calling and denigrating people based on appearance almost every time he opens his mouth. Whatever your politics, name calling is bullying. Making fun of someone based on appearance is bullying. It does not reflect strength of character, it reflects small-mindedness and mean spiritedness. Bullying has real-world consequences, as we know from the young people who have committed suicide to escape the pain being the victim of bullying has caused. Cyberbullying reaches a larger audience. Children will continue to bully until and unless we set a zero-tolerance policy for adult bullying. I hope that day comes soon.