Are we too quick to cry bully?

PARENTING: There’s a big difference between children arguing and children being bullied – and parents and teachers need to recognise that

‘I AM NOT going to be your friend anymore.” It is the sort of ultimatum that trips off the tongue of young children in a momentary stand-off and soon they are playing together happily again.

Falling out and making up with individuals or groups is part of the politics of the playground. There is jostling for position, both physically and metaphorically, among those who like to lead and others who prefer to follow.

While their bluntness can make us wince, groups of children develop their own code of behaviour and they are often well able to sort out little tiffs unaided. (Not that they seem “little” to the children.)

Nobody likes to see a child upset, but are adults too quick these days to rush in and cry “bully” when a child is simply being “mean” to another? Parents are instinctively inclined to take the side of their child and want to sort things out, while teachers do not want to stand accused of being soft on bullying.

British writer and play consultant Tim Gill, who was in Dublin recently to address the Irish Preschool Play Association (IPPA) annual conference, says there is growing evidence that some parents, teachers and children are labelling behaviour as bullying, which he argues is “kids being kids”.

It was a belief he first outlined in his book, No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Adverse Society, three years ago, but one which has been strengthened in his own mind since.

“I felt I was going out on a limb a bit when I wrote the book. The reaction on the whole was people saying, ‘Yes you’re absolutely right’,” he says.

“I am not saying that bullying is something kids have to cope with,” he stresses. “It is about the misdiagnosis of bullying.”

So how do we tell where children falling out stops and bullying starts? “It is not always easy,” he acknowledges. There is a question of whether it is sustained, involves a power imbalance and also a matter of degree.

We sometimes have this illusion that there is always an objective answer, he suggests. There are shades of grey, so our responses need to be thoughtful and reflect that complexity rather than being governed by black-and-white policies.

“My fear about some anti-bullying initiatives is that they can undermine judgment and then teachers feel under a great deal of pressure to be seen to do something and that is where you get the slide towards a zero-risk approach.”

We need to move towards a philosophy of nurturing resilience in children, he says, rather than trying to protect them from every imaginable risk. “Schools and other providers [should] see that part of their job with children is to help equip them for the ups and downs of everyday life.”

This does not mean abandoning them to their own devices but, at the same time, adults should not step in at the first sign of problems. We need to learn the art of saying things such as, “Can you sort it out for yourself and if you can’t, come and ask for help”.

Well-meaning people will ask, “How can you say we should take a more balanced approach to bullying when we have people who are committing suicide or having their lives destroyed by bullying?” he continues.

“I think that is muddying the waters and it is also scaremongering. Yes, those terrible things happen and we need to do something about those terrible events and be effective in dealing with serious bullying, but we don’t do that by pretending that every time a child gets upset [it] will end up a case like that.

“There is a spectrum and we do best by the children who get really hurt by directing our attentions to them,” he adds, “not wasting time and resources through misdiagnosis.”

However, the founder of the Anti-Bullying Centre in Trinity College Dublin, Prof Mona O’Moore, stresses the importance of early intervention by adults in the case of any inappropriately aggressive behaviour. Maybe such behaviour should not be defined as bullying, she says, but it does need to be stopped.

“Bullying is like a cancer, you should be getting at the symptoms,” she warns. “Children are forever testing each other out. If they get away with something, it is going to escalate.”

In the ideal world, she suggests, we would be correcting children every time they step out of line. That does not have to be done in a punitive way; positive correction involves explaining why the behaviour is not acceptable.

“It is by being consistent and taking every aggressive act as a ‘no-no’ that one will be preventing bullying.”

The problem with schools, she argues, is “that they’re sitting there saying, ‘Is this bullying or is it not’, and if it’s not, well they won’t do anything. In the meantime, the character just goes on and escalates his campaign against whoever it is. Schools should take the view in their anti-bullying policies that they don’t accept inappropriate aggression, rather than waiting until it is bullying.”

Contrary to what Gill says about schools in the UK, Prof O’Moore believes that teachers here prefer to say something is not bullying. “Schools drive parents up the wall trying to explain it away, that it is not bullying.”

Parents should be encouraged to voice any concern they might have to schools, she says, then they can quietly monitor the situation. In the same way, parents ought to welcome teachers’ concerns.

“You should be delighted to get information that your child is bullying sooner rather than later,” she points out, so you can look at the cause and tackle it.

All parents need to discuss bullying with their children and teach them how to deal with conflict. Any child can be bullied and, equally, any child can be sucked into behaving like a bully because of peer pressure.

Parents need to reinforce, she adds, that bullying is (a) wrong; (b) there is no shame in being bullied because the problem lies with the perpetrator; and (c) children should not be afraid to tell somebody about it.

Primary school teachers use their discretion and judgment in dealing with cases and do not apply anti-bullying procedures unless they are warranted, according to Larry Fleming of the Irish Primary Principals Network.

“Policies don’t dictate a way the teacher will relate or intervene in an individual incident that may occur. Nor do boards of management proscribe to teachers that they follow a policy, black and white as it were.”

He agrees there is a tendency for parents to misdiagnose bullying and to react to an isolated incident which generally would work itself out. Parents need to be quite certain, he says, that it is continual and not a once-off.

While it is a good idea to raise any concern with the teacher, it is also important to listen to that teacher’s perspective, he adds.

Parents are so fearful of bullying nowadays that they do jump in, says Rita O’Reilly, manager of Parentline. However, it is damaging not only for a child to be labelled as a bully but also as being bullied.

Stressing that bullying is “horrendous”, O’Reilly nonetheless thinks Gill has a point – although she is at a loss to explain how we have got to this stage.

“I am all for letting kids play and letting them push the boundaries a little bit,” she says. “I think they need to be allowed to explore. A kid who is minded too much – it is not necessarily good for them.”

Irene Gunning, chief executive of the IPPA, says she was delighted to hear Tim Gill talk at the conference about something that she has always felt very strongly about, namely the tendency to push adult culture on children and label them bullies when they are just learning to socialise.

It is the job of early childhood educators, she says, to help children learn how to speak up for themselves and assert themselves but not to be aggressive. However, she thinks children nowadays are expected to be unnaturally polite to each other.

“Why have we become so uncomfortable with children’s rough and tumble play?” she asks. There is a lot of research that shows how important it is in children’s lives.

“Children have to learn how far they can push – there is a physical and emotional aspect to it,” Gunning points out. “It is the way you learn what to take on, what to leave and what to cope with.”

The problem is adults have difficulty distinguishing between what is “good” rough and tumble play and what is “bad” aggressive play. “It really is a dilemma and we should open it up a bit and talk about it,” she adds.

About 11 per cent of calls to Childline are about bullying, abuse and violence, reports its national manager, Lloyd Byrne of the ISPCC. Every child has experienced bullying, whether as a victim, a perpetrator or seeing another child being bullied, he suggests.

He advises parents to get all the information they can if their child says they are being bullied – the what, where and when, did it happen before, did anybody see it – then set up a plan of action and, if needs be, intervene.

“The most important thing”, he adds, “is that your child is safe from physical harm and not put at risk.”

Gill’s argument is that the real world is not zero-risk. That can sound callous, he admits, but it is a matter of finding a reasonable balance and accepting there is a difference between sympathy “for the most unlucky” and promises that we can make the world perfect, “because we can’t”.

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When children are socialising online, it can be difficult for them to move on after temporary flare-ups when the evidence remains for others to see.

“Cyber bullying does raise some tricky issues,” says Tim Gill. “The nature of the bullying is different because children can be anonymous and then there is a permanent record. This has the potential to cause more damage, there is no doubt about that.

“The other complication is that cyberspace is a social space where the rules are being written and that is difficult for all of us.”

Learning the basic rules of social engagement, through their own experiences, will help prepare them for the online world, he suggests.

“I don’t have any answers,” adds Gill, “except to make sure we are asking the right questions.”

There is no evidence in the ongoing Growing Up in Ireland study to support the argument that parents are stepping in too early over bullying, says its principal investigator and co-director, Prof James Williams.

On the contrary, a significant gap between what the nine-year-old children who were surveyed reported and what their mothers said would suggest the opposite. According to the mothers, 24 per cent of the children had been bullied in the past year, but when the children were interviewed, 40 per cent said they had been victimised during that time.

That 16 per cent difference should not be dismissed as frivolous or irrelevant, stresses Prof Williams, research professor with the Economic and Social Research Institute. “It could be that parents are simply not aware of it. Or there may be things going on in the life of the children that they perceive as bullying but the parents take a slightly different perspective.

“Regardless of the reason for the difference, the big thing that has to be looked at is the impact it has on the child,” he says. Like all the issues covered in this national longitudinal survey, it can be tracked when the children are re-interviewed at the age of 13 next year.

Prof Williams is not aware of any other area in the survey where the children’s response was at such variance with their parents. However, he points out that it did have the greatest potential for the gap, given the complexity of the issue. “There is a world of interpretation there.”