Bullying Solution: Be a Girl?

Research shows that boys bully and girls defend victims from bullying.  In a society that thinks of boys as heroes, how did we let girls take over the “good guy” role?  The answer may help us solve some problems.

Once we get over the idea of the stereotypical action hero stepping in and saving the day, we start to consider that, in our culture, girls are often thought of as nurturing while boys are often thought of as aggressive.  In this context, we can understand how girls are the ones who try to help victims in a pinch, while boys are the ones doing the pinching.  This difference in behavior creates some disadvantages for boys…and men.

The tendency to help victims is associated with all kinds of enviable characteristics, like high “genuine” self-esteem, exceptional moral reasoning, academic confidence, and other positive attributes.  These qualities are, in turn, associated with healthy and successful lives.  But a tendency to bully is associated with criminal activity, drug problems, relationship failure, and other negative life outcomes.

So, should boys just resign themselves to being bullies, and victims, while girls mop up all the glory and success?  I mean boys are boys, right?  They are just naturally aggressive, right?  Well, yes and NO.  Research suggests that these differences in behavior between boys and girls come more from societal expectations than any innate traits.  We expect boys to bully and we expect girls to help out, so they do.

These societal expectations are so powerful that, even when girls do bully, they do it in a more complex, social way.  They engage in social sabotage because in our society girls are thought of as social and sophisticated, while boys are thought of as direct and physical.

However, in our society masculinity is favored over femininity.  And recent research is discovering some disturbing changes in girls’ behavior.  It looks as if girls are now adopting some of the worst male-stereotyped behavior.  They are increasing their criminal involvement and they are committing more acts of physical aggression.  Bad news, but it suggests a solution.

Parents, friends, and teachers are the conduits of social expectations.  Boys and girls know how to behave because those who are close to them expect them to behave in certain ways.  If we expect our boys to be nurturing and helpful and unaggressive, chances are that they will meet those expectations. 

Having a mindset that boys should be loving and helpful is not really that new, even in our society.  The iconic American male is often the one who stands against the crowd, lends a hand, champions the underdog, and applies tenderness where it’s needed.  We just seem to forget those aspects of manliness too often.  But we can’t continue to ignore that part of being a man anymore, not if we want our boys to be as successful and healthy as our girls.


Some ways to encourage the best in our boys and our girls:


§   Watch movies where men stick up for others without using violence.


§   Watch movies where women take on tough challenges and win.


§   Talk to your boys about what it means to be a man.  Listen to what they say, and remind them that men are sweet and gentle, loving and kind.


§   Tell your girls that they should be proud of being girls, that they are strong women in the making.  Ask them what they think it means to be women.


§   Cultivate in yourself a new vision of maleness and femaleness.  Realize that many male and female stereotypes are not based in reality.  Your expectations affect your children’s behavior.


§   Look at your own relationships.  Do you stick to feminine and masculine stereotypes to your own detriment?  Is there domestic violence or unfairness in your interactions?  Changing these dynamics will set a tremendous example for the kids you care for.


§   Discuss popular media with children.  Talk to them about the stereotypes you see for men and women in music, movies, and television.


§   Make sure that you know the crowd your children hang out with.  Peer expectations can make much of the difference.

Know You’re Draggin’? Know Your Dragon.

I admire people who are recovering from substance addictions. Think about it. They’ve been told by specialists that they have a permanent problem with a drug, like alcohol. Furthermore, they cannot ever ingest that substance again without risking mayhem.

Yet they often appear more insightful than people who have no problem with chemicals. I think I know why. It has a lot to do with fantasy fiction.

People in addiction recovery are like knights on a Quest. They have been given a lifelong goal that they did not ask for, and obstacles they did not request. Recovery is their most obvious goal and addiction is their most persistent obstacle, an immortal Dragon. Along with those complications, they also have the standard responsibilities we all have. Unlike many of us, though, they can count at least one extra blessing: they know the name of the Dragon they face.

Addicts in recovery actively engage their Dragon every day. That’s what addiction recovery is, daily engagement. They use support groups, therapists, avoidance of things that trigger substance use, avoidance of people who use, 12 steps, literature on healthy living, looking inward, soul searching, a higher power, the insights of others, and a bevy of other life tools that would be good for any of us—daily. Many of us get by without availing ourselves of any of these resources. But addicts can’t. They are on a path of constant growth and maintenance or…(not to be too dramatic)…else.

Non-addicts can “get away” with turning a blind eye to their Dragons and their lifelong mission. They can live lives of unhappy resignation, ignoring their innermost dreams, skirting challenging experiences, and refusing to identify their blind spots.

The Dragons of non-addicts are not as plainly visible as inappropriate chemical use. One's Dragon might be a pattern of behavior, emotion, or thought. People pleasing, hurting others, and lack of assertiveness are examples of behavioral patterns. Depression, anxiety, and hatred are common emotional tendencies. Obsession, cynicism, and self-doubt are a few habits of thought. These problems can pester us a long time without us even realizing it.

People often see addicts as different, but everyone has Dragons. Everyone has a life challenge. Everyone is either a knight in uniform engaging their Quest, or a knight in their underwear, dragging their swords behind them, wondering what's missing.

Identifying your task on earth allows you to find the meaning inherent in your existence, the end of the movie you are writing with your life. Identifying what keeps you from attaining your goal gives you the raw material for all of the actions sequences: the Dragon you must battle, tame, or befriend. Below are some questions to help you identify both your Quest and your Dragon.

Know Your Quest:

• What societal problem would you like to eradicate?
• What job have you always felt like doing?
• What do other people keep telling you you’re good at?
• What is something that you already know you are good at, but that you rarely show off to others?
• What dream did you give up somewhere along the way?
• What need do you see in the world that you wish someone would address?
• What activity fills you with passion or energy?
• How would you like your life to look 5, 10, or 20 years from now if there were no limitations to what is possible?

Know Your Dragon:

• What do you keep doing that you wish you could stop doing?
• What do you see other people doing to you that you wish they would stop doing?
• How is your financial situation?
• How is your health?
• Do you have any nagging thoughts or feelings?
• Are you having trouble dealing with a loss?
• Is your life so full of drama or obligations that you are doubting your ability to cope?
• Do you have negative opinions of yourself, people in general, or the world?
• How do you feel from day-to-day?
• What have others told you is a problem for you or them?
  

These questions are just a few probes to get you exploring. Seek and your Quest will eventually present itself to you. Keep your eyes open and you will recognize your Dragon. Name them both and live the adventure. By the way, play it safe. Protect yourself and enlist help. Even knights have their armor and their squires.

10 Difficult Steps To Ending Bullying Problems

Bullying is not just a harmless activity that helps kids learn social skills through peer interaction. Bullying is peer-on-peer abuse that inculcates fear, depression, anxiety, injury, illness, suicidality, and homicidality. So, it’s time to put a stop to it.

Everyone—adult and child alike—can take action against bullying, whether you’re a victim, a bully, or someone who watches but hasn’t taken action yet. Here are some pointers.

1. Be Aware. Bullying is when one person or group of people repeatedly overpower another group of people. It can be physical, verbal, or social (like excluding someone from a group. It can also be indirect, like stealing things from someone’s locker. It is not a fight or argument that happens only once between equal competitors. If you think bullying is going on, check it out.

2. Be Brave. Do what you’re afraid of doing. Make a knew friend, tell the bully what you’re feeling, tell an adult, help out a victim (even if you are one).

3. Be Social. Research shows that making friends with people who are nice can improve your situation, whether you’re a victim, a bully, a bystander, or one of the heroic kids who actually helps. Find someone understanding who can appreciate the person you really are. There is strength in numbers, and making healthy friends can change your life.

4. Be Bold. Tell the bully what you’re feeling. Tell anyone who participates in the bullying what your feeling. Get them on your side, or at least try. Of course, in cases of severe physical endangerment, talking to the bully may be the wrong thing to do. But remember, bullying is not just physical. It is any repeated behavior that involves one person overpowering another—like threats, rumor spreading, internet embarrassment, teasing, or other behaviors. Some bullies can be confronted.

5. Be Public. Tell adults about the bullying. Bullying thrives on solitude. It relies on secrecy. Tell adults until you see the situation improve. I admit that some adults make the situation worse, but you will only find a helpful adult if you keep reporting the problem until you see the results you want. Sometimes, you even have to tell the police.

6. Be Heroic. Studies indicate that kids who help victims of bullying are more popular than other kids, have more self-esteem, better self-control, higher moral sensibility, and other positive characteristics that are linked to success in life.

7. Be Nonviolent. Of course you have the right to use force to get yourself out of a sticky situation, but that’s where it ends. Returning aggression with aggression can get you in trouble, make people think you are the bully, and can just embroil you in a nasty, complicated hurting match.

8. Be Political. Work to change policy and attitudes about bullying in your school or community. Advocate for those in need. Think schools know how to handle bullying? Please, think again. It varies. Some schools are safe environments. Some schools resemble Lord of the Flies.

9. Be Persistent. Don’t give up. If working to end bullying seems difficult, remember two things: the struggle will make you stronger and giving up will make things worse.

10. Be a Bridge. A multigenerational bridge. If you’re an adult, show this article to a child or teen. If you’re a child or teen, show this article to an adult in your life. Everyone can help stop bullying. And everyone, adult or child, bully or victim, aware or not, can benefit from the effort.

Bullying is harassment. It is abuse. It is terror. It is preventable.

To-Do What You’re Afraid of To-Doing

If you find yourself moving a particular item several times from one day’s “to-do” list to the next day’s, there’s probably something unpleasant about the task that you don’t want to experience. Chances are, that task is pretty important.

Important tasks are often the errands people instinctively avoid. They are sometimes new and unfamiliar and even may have a “learning curve.” They can be more time-consuming than less important undertakings. Important tasks are often open-ended, like that single phone call that might lead to several other phone calls before an issue is resolved. They are often intimidating, like requests that might end in rejection or disappointment. Perhaps most unpleasant, important tasks might change our lives—and that is scary.

Anticipatory anxiety is often more painful than the actual event you are afraid to experience. When you keep postponing a feared event, your imagination has more time to build the event into a seemingly deadly ordeal.

If your fear makes a mission seem impossible, you may find yourself trying to relieve your anxiety by saying, “That task was really not that important. I don’t really need that money back, or to write that book I always wanted to write, or to get the house I dreamed of, or to get to know that special someone.” Those thoughts, in turn, might tempt you to scratch the most important tasks off of your list.

The solution is to find the scariest thing on your to-do list and do it first. Call that person and ask for your money back, start the first chapter of your book, block off a specific day to go shopping for a new house, or ask that special someone out on a date (That one’s probably on the to-do list in your mind, even if you haven’t written it down). Once you get the activity done, and you’re still alive, your inner anxiety machine will say, “Oh, I guess I’d better learn to tone it down a little.”

So, in many cases you will find that the best course of action is to move the scariest job on your to-do list to the top. Get it over with, and see what life looks like on the other side.

Now that I’ve said that, I’ll go ahead and admit that sometimes a task can remain on your to-do list for weeks precisely because it’s really not that important (or because someone told you to do it but you never really wanted to). We’re sometimes just as afraid to scratch an unimportant task off of our list without doing it as we are to do an important task.

What this means is that, when a task on your to-do list is nagging you, you are the only one who can decide whether it is important enough to do next, or whether it’s unimportant and just needs to be erased. Whichever it is, it’s often best to get it off the list right away, one way, or the other.

The Want Vs. Need Myth

Doing what we need is good for us. Doing what we want is bad. That’s what we often tell ourselves. I think this hinders our success.

The word “want” in our society is loaded with all kinds of sinister, and unnecessary, connotations. We are told to tame our “desires.” We tell our kids not to say “I want, I want, I want.” Even the Rolling Stones (a rock group, mind you) tried to convince us that we can’t always get what we want. So we teach ourselves to go only after what we can justify as a need, a necessity.

This blocks success because many of us tend to create too high a standard for calling something a necessity. We think that if something is not necessary to keep us alive, then it is really not a necessity. Therefore, we do without many things: freedom, respect, the career we dream of, the love partner we deserve, vacations, and even our optimal health.

So, to have a healthy life, we have to go after what we want. Does that mean that we can do whatever we feel like whenever we feel like it? Isn’t that the same as doing what we want? My answer is no.

The biggest distinction to make is not between desire and necessity, but between desire and impulse (that is, between “wanting” and “feeling like”). To help show the difference between the two, I'll talk about how we use our computers.

We often approach our computers to do something productive, say to write a job resume. Writing a resume is not necessarily going to keep us alive any longer, but it can help us move toward a better life—something we “want.” But when we actually get to the computer, we often bump into a truly sinister “feel like.” It’s that urge to do (just a little) surfing. So, we surf the Internet. And not just a little.

Looking at the clock hours later, we sometimes become filled with regret at passing up the opportunity to do something we really wanted to do to improve life.

Over time, passing up opportunities to better our lives can lead to depression, anxiety, or even rage. Then, vicious circle style, we revert back to our urges to mask the negative feelings. We surf the internet, we use drugs, we veg out, we cry, we whine, we overeat, we submit our will to something—often to someone. We basically act on impulse and with little direction—losing motivation and perhaps forgetting our life dreams in the process. And it all starts with putting what we feel like doing ahead of getting what we want to do. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

One way to give our desires a higher priority is by planning. Put your dreams down on paper under the heading “Goals.” Then place actions you want to carry out to accomplish your dreams under the title “Strategies.” Suddenly, your desires have clout and credibility. Now, place your new “Life Plan” in prominent places where diversions seem to rise up.

To fulfill our deepest desires we need to set aside our moment-to-moment urges.