What do you do when your child is being bullied but doesn’t want your help?
Question:
My 12 year old daughter was disciplined by her school for putting up a notice on a private website that the school bully had called on her friends a “bitch.” She did this to defend her friend from a bully but somehow, her school became aware of the website and disciplined her for taking this action. She spent a day in detention. However, they did nothing about the bully’s behavior, which occurred at school. My daughter does not want me to contact the school for her. How do I help her if she won’t let me help her?
Answer:
The reason your daughter probably because her 1 day detention has been served so she probably feels, it’s over now. Also – kids take a while to want parental or adult involvement in things. They really want to learn how to handle these things themselves. You handling this for her would deprive her of that and make her feel like a child who needs protection.
What you do is your support your child in learning what they want to learn and need to learn and offer additional support for them if they decide they need it.
I go through this with my son all the time. I want to jump in and help him, but really, he needs to do things himself. Now that he is a tween, my job is to support him. If I try to protect him, I rob him of the opportunity to learn how to defend himself and become independent. So we talk about what is going on and how HE might deal with it and I help him come up with a strategy HE can implement and feel good about. The key – it’s his strategy and he’s the one responsible for creating it and implementing it. I am supporting him by teach him how he can handle things when they happen and let him do the work.
Normally, once he has gotten things to a point on his own, he will ask me to assist with the administrators and teachers to support what he is doing. But again, that’s me supporting him. Not me fixing things for him.
Our impulse as parents is to fix things. But we really need to trust that our kids can handle these situations with our support.
Hope this helps!