When parents come to me for help – they often want what I consider to be a magic solution. ie: they want one easy thing they can do and then the bullying of their child will stop. I can’t offer that. That’s a magical solution based on magical thinking.
Extinguishing unwanted behaviors is a process that takes place over time and it’s difficult to do and rather unpleasant because it almost always involves an extinction burst.
The protocol requires the removal of reward and consistency of approach. How you remove the reward depends on what the bully gets out of bullying. What constitutes a reward requires a more in depth explanation than I can provide here – but don’t worry I have lots of blog posts that explain it plus several video lessons – in fact, that’s what this site is designed to do – teach you how to get a bully to stop.
What I can tell you now is that how to not reward is actually fairly easy. Almost all anti-bullying programs teach that. The hard part is what happens after you stop rewarding, which is the extinction burst, which is the reason pretty much everyone thinks that the advice most anti-bullying programs give is bogus. It’s not – it’s just incomplete.
I can’t possible teach all that I know in a single article and I don’t try to. What I try to do is get people interested in learning this material in the first place.
Membership at the site is free and includes a LOT of free training materials and lots of blog posts that go into more detail on the various aspects of what has to happen to get a bully to stop. I hope you will take advantage of this information and if you do and you find it helpful, please share this information with others!