The Nine Most Common Myths About Bullying
A tragic cascade of bullying-related suicides has American parents up in arms, sometimes literally. With the national spotlight focused on the issue, everyone has an opinion about bullying and its causes. As an educator and researcher, I’ve been studying bullying, writing about it, and working with schools and families around the country for more than a decade. The following are the nine most unproductive assumptions, myths, and platitudes I’ve been hearing in the course of this debate.
1. Bullying is easy to spot.
Most bullying occurs in the spaces adults don’t occupy: a raucous locker room, an empty hallway, a playground corner. By early elementary school, kids are adept at stealth nastiness. The idea of the bully as bruiser who steals lunch money and makes a scene is mostly obsolete. By middle school, some research finds that boys and girls engage in equal levels of psychological aggression. And looks can be deceiving: two boys playing in the dirt could be two boys playing—or it could be one boy verbally abusing the other. Even the most compassionate teachers struggle to spot the behavior.
2. Bullies are easy to spot.
I’ve heard countless elementary-school students say things like "I tried to tell my teacher about the bully, but she said, ‘Her? No! She’s your friend!’?" Bullies are talented chameleons. The most psychologically aggressive kids are usually the ones who cop angelic poses when adults walk into the room (Eddie Haskell, anyone?). These kids possess high social intelligence. The same skills that enable them to hurt their peers are precisely what allow them to manipulate adults.
3. Bullies are unpopular and have low self-esteem.
Research is finally catching up with what parents and teachers have known for years: plenty of the most aggressive kids are confident and socially successful. Bullying and aggression can yield rich social rewards like attention, more friends, and power. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to get kids to stop: gossip and exclusion bring people together, even as they push others out. And it’s why involving kids with high social status in anti-bullying programs is so important.
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