And We Fight Bullying With Confidence

When a three-year-old throws tantrums, it’s understandable that the kid is trying to assess its boundaries of independence. But what happens when a generally mature-minded and confident six-year-old begins to throw tantrums? As a working mom whose day begins before dawn and ends pretty close to midnight, my battery pretty much enters the red by late evening. Add to this thoughts about work, home, menu for the next day, kid’s homework and assignments, financial planning and a zillion others swirling around in the mind exhausting it. And when the six-year-old throws a tantrum, my natural reaction is to get irritated, annoyed and try to shout it down.

But PAUSE.

Somewhere in the back of the exhausted mind is an alarm beeping that says – kiddo’s behaviour isn’t normal.

And then, we TALK.

What tumbles out from kiddo’s mouth isn’t quite surprising. A generally soft and kind hearted kid who loves to make peace most times, ends up facing a dominating kid that pretty much adds a hint of peer bullying. I sigh, because we’ve all gone through it in some way during our growing up years. And those memories come flooding back in hazy bits and pieces. While we probably dealt it differently then, may be never even spoke about it to anyone and punched or cried into the pillow at nights or screamed, shouted and fought with the very bully, times are changing today.

Peer pressure has been growing quite dramatically in this rat race of a world that we are living in today. Even if we as parents try to keep kids away from this racing track, it comes back to claw in different ways. Comparison of toys, skills, nurturing of leadership qualities, competitions, awards… all of these show up in their own special way to keep the competitive spirit, at times, at an unhealthy high.

Over the last few weeks since the outburst, after several tried and tested ways, we – my husband and I that is – have found quite an effective solution. TALK.

But here’s comes the play of what to talk and what not. Most often, as protective as we can get, we may feel tempted to speak ill of the bully to make our child feel better. But this is just a balm, not a remedy to solve the problem at the core – and that is to EMPOWER this little human with survival skills.

To begin with, we first let our girl burst open her dams. Once the bawling was done with, the next step was to let her mention everything the other kid said or did. Threats such as (as an example) – “I’ll tell my elder sister to take you to the principal if you tell ma’am I was talking in class”, watered down to nothing when we explained to her that neither the kid’s elder sibling would do such a thing, nor would the principal encourage such behaviour. This resulted in the first important learning – to learn to sift truth from sham and use her best judgment to do what’s right.

Even as we made things clear for our girl, it was important that we did so without creating a bias in her mind against her classmate – after all, she is a child growing up and learning life on the go and as grown-ups we have no right to put down one child in front of another. So the next step was to empower her to face the situation without fear. We gave her examples from everyday life, helped her learn to emote and express her feelings and thoughts by being firm but kind. But most importantly, they were tools for her to stand up for what’s right without fear and oppose what’s wrong.

And we ensured we kept this conversation going before bedtime every other day (not too often though), seeding empowering positive thoughts before she went to sleep to reinforce them from deep within. Over a period of few weeks, the problems seem lesser and are seeming to die down, while conversations around how she has been handling her classmate are becoming more interesting.

YES – listen keenly to what your kid says about what he/she is doing because you want to know that your child is doing the right things and not turning into a bully instead!

As we watched her confidence return, it made us realise that there’s so much with kids that we take for granted just because we believe we can handle such situations with ease. What we seem to forget as we grow is that the child’s mind is unblemished and perceptions are different from that of adults. For instance, we may look at a small school van and wonder how good might its education system be, but the kid may find the van cute. We may look at a heavy downpour and wonder about the condition of the roads while kids are busy making paper boats to float them around. We may look at school worksheet schedules and crib about study pressure, while kids may actually look at it and say – “Oh wow! Those worksheets are fun to do in class. We have a competition to see who finishes first and who gets the most number of stars.”

To read more articles on our personal parenting style, visit our blog This Short Story