Bullying In The News

October 6, 2010 - So bullying and cyber bullying has been front and center in the news lately due to a spate of suicides and number of new campaigns to draw awareness to this issue. The comments to the articles I've read seem to come down to three basic camps: the "parents should step in and solve the problem" camp, the "kids should grow a pair and learn to solve their own problems" camp, and the "kids should give it a try, but definitely reach out for help if the situation is not improving" camp

I think fall somewhere in the last camp, myself. However in all of the articles I've read, something disturbing seems to be missing. The experts say that technology makes it easy to disassociate the effects of our actions from the action itself (the example used was "I kill people in video games and nothing bad happens in real life") and the focus has been on trying to draw a correlation between the action and the effect in the real world. The question I feel like is being ignored is this:

Why aren't people teaching their children to have respect for themselves and others at all times and not just when they are face to face? I understand that children have brains that aren't fully developed and that the connection to cause and effect isn't always there, but what happened to "treat people how you want them to treat you"? Maybe if this was the lesson we were teaching school children, instead of trying to reason with them about how their actions have effects on others that they might not understand (or indeed have any way to control), we should be teaching them how to comport themselves with more dignity and respect in all aspects of their daily lives.

Just something I've been thinking about this week. Have a good one!