Children and Bullying

[Guest guest]

Little bullies begin tormenting others early on

75 percent of those ages 8 to 11 say they've been targets, expert says

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25336574/

Recess was Allie Long's favorite part of the day until the second

grade, when some of her friends on the playground pressured her to

join their whisper campaign against a classmate.

Allie shrugged. She didn't want to hear their rumor or help spread it

around. In an instant, her best friends since kindergarten became her

tormenters.

" They started taunting and teasing her, " said Allie's mom, Trudy

Ludwig. " She was on this play structure and they blocked all of the

exits and wouldn't let her off. They started moving closer to her.

Allie just freaked out. One of the girls realized it was getting out

of hand and got a teacher to help. "

Bullying among adolescents has captured the attention of researchers,

educators and parents alarmed by a parade of mean girls and cyber-

bullies caught in mid-punch on viral video. But such aggression may

not just happen in a whirl of adolescent hormones, some in the

growing anti-bully movement argue.

Some older bullies were " Barbie brats " first.

In Allie's case, the kids were talked to, but things weren't the same

at her Beaverton, Ore., school.

" My daughter cried herself to sleep on and off for several months, "

Ludwig said. " She had stomach aches. The phone stopped ringing. No

playdates. No invitations to sleepovers. "

They were just 7 years old.

Grade-school bullies

Meline Kevorkian, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., researcher and public

speaker on bullying, surveyed 167 educators last year and 25 percent

indicated bullying occurs most in elementary schools. Research also

indicates that three-quarters of 8- to 11-year-olds report they've

been bullied, with more than half identifying it as a " big " problem,

Kevorkian said.

" It could be you wear the wrong shoes or the wrong socks. If you

didn't go to the Hannah Montana concert. Your lunch smells. You can't

wear certain bows in your hair, " she said. " It's not that the victims

are all going to grow up and shoot kids in their high school, but

it's the message that making fun of people will make you popular. "

Rumor-spreading, teasing, exclusive clubs, secrets. What social

scientists describe as " relational aggression " is often unjustly

written off among younger kids as routine rites of passage not worthy

of extra hands-on attention, Kevorkian and other anti-bully experts

said.

Parents of targeted children agreed.

" Everybody seems under the impression that their child is well

behaved in all settings, " said Borre, whose 9-year-old son,

lin, loves sports but is small for his age and often struggles

for equal time during playground baseball and basketball games in

Libertyville, Ill.

" Nobody is willing to believe their children might behave differently

on the playground, " she said. " I just sort of felt like at this age

the kids would still be gentler, kinder, would still behave more like

little children. It's almost like a smaller version of an adult world

that he's dealing with. "

Easily overlooked

Ludwig, who was inspired by her now 14-year-old daughter's experience

to write four picture books on bullying, said girls in particular

often connect by sharing secrets that can later be turned into

weapons. Such verbal abuse and social manipulation, which Ludwig and

other experts say is on the rise in boys, often flies under the radar

of harried parents, teachers or baby sitters.

" It's evident in preschool. 'If you don't let me play with that toy I

won't invite you to my birthday party,' " Ludwig said. " Intentional

exclusion is bullying. Giving the silent treatment is bullying. It's

not a part of growing up. It's not something kids can work out

themselves. It's not normal conflict. We've normalized this abnormal

behavior in our society. "

Little research has tracked bullying among the very young, but the

topic is beginning to gain momentum. Intervention programs, including

fifth-graders tapped as peer mediators on playgrounds, began popping

up a few years ago in elementary schools, but the institutional

response to bullying is often piecemeal or inconsistent, advocates

said.

Michele Borba, who writes and speaks frequently on bullying, felt so

intensely about such incidents among the very young that she helped

develop a " Caring Corners " dollhouse due on the market later this

year, designed to talk to kids about positive behavior.

" Little kids are born to be kindhearted, " Borba said. " They've got

that natural empathy, but unless you nurture it, it lies dormant. "

Nurturing empathy might be hard for competitive parents who scream at

6-year-olds during soccer games, or buy Coach bags for their girls,

then wonder out loud who's carrying the knockoffs, said Barbara

Kimmel, the mother of two boys, ages 11 and 14, in County, N.J.