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    Sticks and Stones
    Sticks and Stones
    Sticks and Stones
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    Sticks and Stones

    By Thomas Nelson

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Sticks and Stones is for parents, youth leaders, and small group leaders to use in helping teens cope with the various issues relating to teasing, taunting, and harassment by: identifying key issues related to bullying, offering practical steps for teaching teens how to handle teasing and how to become an interceder for victims of teasing, and examining the spectrum of bullying from teasing and taunting to physical violence. Adults and teens will be encouraged to take a proactive role, not only in helping victims, but also in targeting the potential for bullying teens and putting an end to the destructive cycle.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Nelson
    Release dateMar 5, 2002
    ISBN9781418557522
    Sticks and Stones

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      Book preview

      Sticks and Stones - Thomas Nelson

      Sticks and Stones

      Sticks and

      Stones

      KAREN L. MAUDLIN, PSY.D.

      Sticks_Stones_0002_001

      STICKS AND STONES

      by Karen L. Maudlin

      Copyright © 2002 Karen L. Maudlin.

      Published by The W Publishing Group, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc.,

      P.O. Box 141000, Nashville, Tennessee 37214.

      All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      Quotations taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible (NRSV). Copyright © 1989 Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Produced with the assistance of The Livingstone Corporation. Editorial work by Joan Guest and Paige Drygas; additional concept help and stories from April Carlson.

      ISBN 0-8499-4356-6

      Printed in the United States of America

      02 03 04 05 06 07 PHX 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Dedication

      For Katie and Alexa, my most precious gifts from God.

      Thank you for continuing to teach me that respect is a two-way street that needs to be traveled on a daily basis.

      For Ben and Anne Grimshaw, my grandparents, who make my world a safer place.

      Contents

      CHAPTER 1

      What Is Bullying?

      CHAPTER 2

      Who Are the Bullies?

      CHAPTER 3

      Victims and Bystanders

      CHAPTER 4

      What Kids Can Do

      CHAPTER 5

      What Parents Can Do

      CHAPTER 6

      What Schools Can Do

      CHAPTER 7

      School Intervention and Prevention Programs

      APPENDIX A

      Resources for Schools and Parents

      APPENDIX B

      Myths and Facts About Bullying

      APPENDIX C

      Characteristics of Youth Who Have Caused School-

      Associated Violent Deaths

      APPENDIX D

      Things Children Should Know to Protect Themselves

      APPENDIX E

      16 Sure Signs of Strong Self-Esteem

      NOTES

      BIBLIOGRAPHY

      Acknowledgments

      I want to thank my family for their love, encouragement, and patience (did I mention patience?) during this project. For my girls, thank you for the maturity of understanding the time and energy away and your ability to understand that almost done really does precede done. I want to thank my sister, Nancy, for her steadfast encouragement in my life. You have always urged me to follow my dreams and to stand up for myself. Your guidance as an older sister helped me learn how to deal with bullies early in life.

      It is hard to describe all my appreciation for the fine editorial hand of the best editor I know, my husband Mickey. I am grateful for your tireless wee morning hours of editing, refining, and shaping this book.

      Thanks to my editors at The Livingstone Corporation, Paige Drygas and Joan Guest, for their contribution to the project. It was Livingstone’s vision for this book that made it happen.

      I want to thank all the school administrators for sharing so freely your wealth of knowledge and experience. I admire your passion to educate kids both in their minds and in their character. I appreciate all the parents for sharing your stories from the school of hard knocks in dealing with bullying in your children’s lives.

      I especially want to thank all the children and adolescents who shared their painful stories and their courageous lessons in order to help other kids and adults learn and grow in their respectfulness toward others.

      Chapter One

      What Is Bullying?

      Character is a diamond that scratches every other stone.

      —CYRUS A. BARTON

      HAMAD’S

      ¹ FAMILY moved to North America after living amid violence in the Middle East. Hamad’s father was happy with the life they had found. We came thousands of miles . . . away from war . . . to a country that is safe and peaceful. But Hamad, a fourteen-year-old high school student, was not happy. What he didn’t tell his parents or younger brother was that school had become horrible, horrible. Kids called him names—gay, queer, fag. One student punched him in the stomach. In March 2000, Hamad wrote, I tried to cope with it but I couldn’t take it anymore. After leaving a seven-page letter to his parents absolving them of guilt, he took a walk. He filled his backpack with rocks, made his way to the bridge between New Westminster and Surrey, B.C., and jumped to his death. His parents’ most haunting thought is that he never told them of his troubles.

      Hamad was a victim of bullying. While suicide is an extreme response to bullying, the wounds from verbal and physical harassment run deep. Carol, a college junior, can remember vividly the day in fifth grade when a group of boys started to call her Shamu, after the killer whale at Sea World. For many children, bullying is their first encounter with evil. They come face to face with forces that are not just neutral toward them but are actively malicious. Thus bullying can have a profound, life-shaping effect on its victims.

      According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, nearly 30 percent of children report being involved in bullying, either as a bully or as a victim, in the past year—10 percent as victims, 13 percent as bullies, and 6 percent as both bully and victim. A staggering 8 percent said they were bullied at least once weekly.² The report also confirmed what many other studies have found: Bullying is most common in the middle school, or junior high, years and decreases as kids enter the later teenage years.

      While 30 percent of kids report being involved with bullying in the last year, when researchers asked how many have ever been involved with bullying, either as a bully or as a victim or both, the percentage rises dramatically. One study of students from the Midwest found that over the course of their middle and high school careers, 76.8 percent of students . . .say they have been bullied and 14 percent of those students indicated that they experienced severe reactions to the abuse.³ Because so many kids are affected, parents, teachers, administrators, and youth workers need to be alert. (See Appendix B for myths and facts.)

      Yet there is a strange silence about a problem that affects so many families. Few schools actively work to educate parents and students about bullying. And for parents, bullying is an easy problem to want to minimize or write off as boys being boys or girls being catty. Often we simply do not face and confront the problem.

      Our culture tends to inoculate us against the impact of small violent and disrespectful actions, treating them as rites of passage for our children. But another statistic reveals the lie behind that attitude. One study found that 60 percent of those characterized as bullies in grades 6-9 had at least one criminal conviction by age 24.⁴ In fact, research shows that school bullies become adult bullies, using their primitive tactics to get their way in adult life. In other words, if students and schools don’t intervene to show bullies that their behavior is unacceptable, society will have to teach them a much harder lesson later in life, probably after many more people have been victimized.

      THE DENIAL FACTOR

      The reason we underplay the problem is that the issue of child safety makes us as parents uneasy. We are uncomfortable with the thought that our children will confront evil without our protection. So it is hard to face problems that we know are complicated or that we feel we have no control over.

      Take courage. It is only in facing the problem that we will be able to challenge and reduce it in our schools and communities. In fact, the single most effective factor in reducing bullying is adult intervention.

      The National School Safety Center estimates that over half a million attacks, shakedowns, and robberies occur in an average month in public secondary schools. And, according to one estimate by the National Education Association, as many as 160,000 students miss school every day because they fear attack. Dealing with bullies is not an uncommon problem facing our children.

      Our schools are not the places they once were. Schools today are more overcrowded, potentially lethal (with drugs and weapons available), and racially and ethnically diverse, which adds complexity and tension to the school atmosphere. Basic respect for authority can no longer be assumed. Stories of teachers being threatened, hit, or even shot appear in our newspapers every year.

      If you think it is someone else’s school where bullying occurs, think again. While direct physical assault seems to decrease with age, verbal abuse appears to remain constant. School size, racial composition, and school setting (rural, suburban, or urban) do not seem to be distinguishing factors in predicting the occurrence of bullying.⁵

      Preparing kids in elementary school with assertiveness skills, knowledge, and self-confidence for the junior high onslaught is essential. Establishing effective bully intervention strategies with parents, teachers, and students can dramatically affect the entire emotional experience of school for many students.

      KIDS ARE PEOPLE, TOO

      In the twenty-first century, many say civility is dead. From road rage to simple rudeness, from the Columbine shootings to the World Trade Center attack, showing respect to one another is an increasingly rare virtue. But it is a necessary virtue for society to work.

      In churches and schools, we often hold up the intrinsic values that children are gifts from God (in the church) and that they are worthy of respect and dignity (in the schools). However, we often fall short of living out those values. Do we really hold the same standards for respect for children as we do for adults?

      A seven-year-old boy is bathing at night and his mom notices bruises on his arm. What happened to you? asks the mom. The boy begins to cry as he reluctantly admits that a known bully waits for him on the playground each day and hits him if he doesn’t let him cut in line for tetherball. The mom

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