The problem is that the most effective bullying prevention programs don’t help everyone. They help encourage kids to be “upstanders” but they don’t really do much to help kids who are dealing with a chronic bullying problem. Once bullying has become chronic, what the kids need now is to be taught how to get it to stop.
The simple truth is – it is your responsibility as the parent to teach your child how to deal with bullies. So learn what you need to know and get on with it.
Our impulse as parents is to fix things. But we really need to trust that our kids can handle these situations with our support.
So what can and should a school be doing? They should be maximizing their responses to reports of problems to facilitate behavioral extinction of bullying behavior and they should ensure their processes follow up to ensure the bullying behavior is actually extinguished. But they can’t do that if they don’t understand the process of behavioral extinction. This requires knowledge of and experience with behavioral modification techniques known as operant conditioning.
