“Ewwww! Your shoes smell like fish!”
First off all, I can assure you that my shoes DID NOT smell like fish. Even if they did, how would this girl know? She never once got close enough to even know what my shoes smelled like! She completely terrified me and I avoided her at all costs. I would take the long way home, just to avoid having to walk past her house. If I did have to walk that way, I would look straight ahead and walk really fast, hoping that she wouldn’t see me. Sometimes I was lucky enough to avoid her, but not always. If I did see her, I knew what was coming, “Ewwww….”
As an adult, it is easy to look back and think how ridiculous the whole situation was. This girl had things pretty rough at home and it was probably a major reason why she bullied me.
In retrospect, it is easy to think, “I should have just been assertive and stood up for myself,” but at the time, I wasn’t a confident adult; I was a 10 year old girl who was being bullied by someone who was older and bigger than I was. I can still remember the feeling I got every time I saw her. My stomach would start doing summersaults, my knees felt like Jell-O and I would feel so nauseous it was amazing that I never threw up in front of her.
Statistics show us that bullying happens far too frequently. The latest Halton Youth Survey shows that:
- 39% of grade 7 students and 28% of grade 10 students in Halton, reported being bullied at school at some point during the 2009/2010 school year.
While most bullying happens at school, it can happen anywhere children are together. As adults, we need to be concerned abut bullying. Both children who are victims and children who bully are at risk for developing a wide variety of emotional and behavioural problems as they get older.
We know that bullying can be a difficult issue to manage. It can be especially emotional for a parent who as a child was a victim of bullying. So what is a parent to do? There are resources available to support you. There are also strategies that children can use if they are being bullied, are the bully or are the bystander.
Remember that attitudes toward managing bullying have changed since you were a kid. Old bullying myths such as “adults should stay out of it” or “kids just have to learn to stand up for themselves” no longer hold true. Research has shown that when a child is being bullied, there is an imbalance of power. The child who is bullying has all of the power and often the victim is unable to stand up for themselves. Sometimes when children do stand up for themselves, especially when they come across aggressively, it can also prolong the bullying or make it worse.
Bullying is definitely a tough topic. This makes it all the more important that we as parents and adults take it seriously. We need learn more about the motivations and impact of bullying in order to help our children overcome it.
About this author:
Erika Norris
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HaltonParents 
Indeed, raising kids is not an easy task, especially that we mother’s are not only protecting our child from any sicknesses but most importantly from any bullies whom they’ll meet. Because as a mother, the idea of my children being harmed or lost is not something anyone wants to consider. Then I found an article by anationofmoms about a service that can protect your family via your cell phone. And, at the bottom there is an opportunity to enter a drawing for 6 months of that service just by liking them on Facebook. You might find it interesting: http://anationofmoms.com/2011/08/protect-your-family-giveaway.html
Being a parent, the one that I hoped for my kids to experience is a joyful growth and a happy life as they grow old. However, bullying issues has been existing everywhere mostly in Schools and its growth were rapid. And a mother my main concern is to protect my kids from any emotional delimma that this bullying can caused. Therefore, reading this article that talks about preventing or stopping these issue makes my heart rejoice knowing that every Shool administration was doing their very best to help kids in dealing bullies. And I’ve also been searching some safety tips that would help me track my kids through the gps that I have on my Android phone. Then I found this site that provides a protection for children from a safety mobile protection that can access family, friends and 911 in times of emergency. I just downloaded their application on my Android phone. Here’s you can find it http://safekidzone.com/