Bully-Proof Your Child

Help for Victims of Mean Girls and Boys

The first months of school are an exciting – and sometimes unsettling – time for many children. As they try to adjust to a new building, classroom or teacher, many kids are thrust into new social situations, trying to make new friendships and solidify old ones.

This can also be a prime time for bullies, seeking the “odd man out” to pick on.

“In the first few weeks of school, you need to be hyper-vigilant,” says Deborah Carpenter, author of The Everything Parent’s Guide to Dealing with Bullies. “Kids who tend to bully will look for kids who don’t have a friendship group or the quieter kids with their heads down.

“If the child doesn’t act like a victim, or if the parents come in immediately and the teachers are all over it, that can stop your child from becoming a victim,” she says. “If you find out in January that your child has been a victim for months, it is harder to stop, and a lot of damage has already been done to your child’s self-esteem.”

So how do you know if your child is the target of a bully, and how should you respond?
As many as 70 percent of children will be a victim of a bully during their school years, and nearly a third of children are victimized each semester, says Nicholas Carlisle, executive director of No Bully, a California nonprofit which provides anti-bullying training to schools.

The National Youth Violence Prevention Center estimates that 5.7 million children in the United States are involved in bullying each year, either as a victim or perpetrator. As many as 160,000 students skip school every day because they fear bullying, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association.