Bullied.

I just received a threatening email from Amazon Kindle. They (the royal “they”) said they noticed I hadn’t posted in over 30 days and they threatened to cancel my Kindle account where people can subscribe to my blog. Apparently customers want to read posts. Humph! Don’t they know that I am trying to raise a tiny person? I’m kind of busy. But I do suppose it is time to get back on the blogging wagon, and it is Bullying Prevention Month, so ironically, I’ve been bullied back on the blogging scene.* And yes, I realize there are only 4 days left of Bullying Prevention Month. For anyone who thinks “I can always work from home when the baby sleeps!” I laugh in your naïve face. I said that before I had a baby and I laugh at my own naïve pre-baby face. But I digress...

I am glad that bullying is becoming an issue that educators are taking on. I endorse prevention programs and intervening early when bullying behavior is discovered. I especially like how school psychologists can take on a preventive role in the creation of a positive school climate. A recent poll of the fabulous folks on my Facey Face page showed that school psychologists are active and involved in the prevention of bullying. A few resources they shared for you to check out:

• National Bullying Prevention Center
• Cruel’s Not Cool
• Teaching Tolerance Website
• Second Step Social Emotional Skills Program

I find that my role in the schools when it comes to bullying prevention actually sadly tends not to be in the prevention area, but in the psychological cleanup and intervention area. I have the distraught student in my office, who finally admits she is sad because she is relentlessly teased. I get the iChats emailed to me by parents to prove their child is being cyber bullied. I get the middle of the night emails from parents worrying their child is being bullied, and requesting a meeting. I get bombarded in the mornings before school starts to talk about bullying. And yes, I even got a parent showing me her secret iPhone video of her daughter being excluded on the playground. It seems like the bullying awareness campaigns at my schools are working.

I am glad that bullying is no longer being written off as a developmentally appropriate “kids can be cruel, what are you going to do?” kind of thing. The problem is, we have gotten so good at raising awareness, but we really haven’t taught the students (or adults for that matter) what to do once we see bullying behavior. By the way, I usually use the term “bullying behavior” instead of “bully” because bullying dynamics are really complex. I have seen kids be the "victim" one day and the "bully" the next.

Addressing bullying on the individual level is hard, especially since much of the behavior is hidden or underground, and there is typically a “he-said she-said” quality to the conflict. How we respond to bullying behavior is really important. While we can’t ignore it, we also can’t jump in and try to solve all of kids’ interpersonal problems for them. Sometimes, when we intervene, we even give lame advice (see: My Words Taste Yucky, by yours truly).

We also need to be careful not to see “bullying” under every single interpersonal conflict. In some of my schools, it has become a catchall for all negative peer interactions. Unfriendly look in the hall? Parent meeting about relational aggression. Child not invited to play tetherball? Request for anti-bullying intervention. During fantasy play, one child pretends to kill off another child’s unicorn? Two hour meeting with parents and students.**

Please don’t get it twisted. I’m not saying to ignore bullying behavior. Chances are, if its reached the level of involving you as a school psychologist, it’s serious, or at least the subjective experience for the student is that it's serious. As school psychologists, we must treat each incident brought to our attention as “bullying” seriously, but also not jump in when it’s not necessary. The problem is, it is hard to tell in advance how serious an incident is. One incident could be the tip of the unicorn’s horn, or it could just be kids playing make believe and having normal conflict. I remember one kid who reported to his teacher that he was being bullied and was scared and she wrote it off as him being “sensitive” and then the next day another student brought a knife to school and threatened him in the bathroom.

So while we can’t jump to intervene at every peer conflict, we should listen to kids when they report bullying behavior. It’s a unspoken challenge for school psychologists to decide what requires individual intervention. That is why I'm a huge fan of prevention programs that teach actual skills to kids, rather than waiting until there is a school culture of bullying behavior that requires a ton of individual intervention.

Now, the real truth about how I feel about bullying will come out, from a new mom’s perspective. If Baby B grows up and someone is mean to her, I like to think I would gently coach her to deal with peer conflicts, and only intervene if necessary, like I do with my students. I like to think I would calmly alert the school to the incident and trust them to handle it. But it’s equally possible that I might just do the same thing as the parents I work with and flip out and call an emergency meeting. I might even turn all Mama Bear protective and demand a school-wide anti-bullying intervention, I don’t know. I just know that when I look at my baby girl, I want to protect her from all things mean. It’s unrealistic, but it’s totally different when you are the parent. This may be the beginning of a series of posts entitled: “Things I recommend to parents as a school psychologist that would be way harder if it were my own child.” I think I’ve figured out a way to be a secret mommy blogger with that series of posts…

*By the way, it takes every fiber of my being not to turn into a mommy blogger. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear about Baby B’s latest developmental milestones? Posts about her visually tracking objects and crossing midline, orienting toward sound, and reaching for objects have broad appeal, right?

**I am not making this up. Happened to a school psych friend of mine. I asked him if his advice was to teach the other kid to make believe their unicorn had a protection spell from all harm. It wasn’t. It should have been.

PBS is my Friend

Hello fellow educators, parents, and random people who google "Throne of Lies!" and get to my blog because of that random post I did about Santa Claus!

There is a new PBS special on my favorite, Frontline, called "Kids Online" about the world of this cyber-savvy generation through the eyes of teens and their parents, who often find themselves on opposite sides of a new digital divide.

Check your local listings, but it should air tomorrow: Click here for information

Can I Get Another Helping?

In the sprit of Thanksgiving, I am going to tell a tale about over-helping.

A few years ago at one of my middle schools, I fell into the over-helping trap, which is essentially solving a child’s problem for him or her. It’s easy to do. After all, I’m a therapist! I help people! They need me! That’s why they came to ME for help! But if I always solve the child’s problem for him or her, what is the implicit message or mental representation of the situation? You cannot solve problems on your own—you must always go to a helper. Of course, there are situations in which it is appropriate to solve a problem for a child, like in an emergency situation, but this is referring to the run-of-the-mill peer conflict.

Here’s a quick exercise. Think of your favorite helping moment. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Mmmm…coffee break…oh! You’re back. Great. What was your favorite helping moment? Was it a time when you were helped by someone? Maybe when someone helped you move? Or when a friend was really there for you? Most likely not. When I do this exercise live, most people think of a time when they helped someone else. Why? Because it feels good to help.

Back to our regularly scheduled middle school story. The research on aggression has indicated that girls participate in relational aggressionwhich consists of everything on the continuum from eye rolling to spreading rumors and a personal favorite of middle schoolers: exclusion and loyalty turf war. It’s a phenomenon I like to call “Fren-a-mies”—one day friends, the next day, enemies.

Two 6th grade girls were plopped in my office—one in tears, one with arms crossed and eyes-a-rollin’. Turns out that Teary Girl was sad that Mad Girl was hanging out with her “enemies” and Mad Girl was mad because she has a right to hang out with whomever she pleases. It became clear that the “enemies” were mad at Teary because they heard she said Enemy #1 was fat. Teary denies it. Enemy 1 would not join the mediation. Enter Enemy #2, cousin of Enemy #1. E2 asked Teary if she said E1 was fat. Teary denied it. E2 says she was mad because ever since the beginning of school, Teary's cousins were mugging E1 and E2 in the hallway and E2 thought they were going to fight after school. Deep breath…..and then it was all uncovered that Teary doesn't even know E1, let alone call her fat in the first place. Mad Girl and E2 were still torn between loyalties without talking to E1. But E1 wasn’t ready to talk yet.*

So the “conflict mediation” was left with: “sometimes people aren’t ready to work things out when they are mad. Teary, call off your cousins. And Good Luck.”

My instinct was to pull out E1 later and find out the story and get her to see Teary’s perspective and help all 4 girls (plus extraneous cousins) put their problem in a box, tie it up neatly, and voila! It’s solved. I felt unsatisfied with the outcome. Teary was still Teary, Mad Girl was still Mad, and the "Enemies" were still excluding Teary. I felt helpless (probably not as helpless as the girls though).

Fast-forward two days. Things move quickly in middle schools, try to keep up. Teary runs up to me in the hall, eyes lit up with exuberance and she exclaims, “Dr. Bell! Dr. Bell! We resolved the conflict!!!” I couldn’t have been prouder. It was a far better resolution to me solving the problem for them and giving a nice little lesson on rumors. If I had done that, I would have denied them the opportunity to work through the difficulty and feel proud that they had resolved the conflict on their own. From then on out, they were all Best! Friends! Forever!**

*Image for you: Me and 3 girls trotting down hall to pull out E1 from class. E1 sees Teary and says, "Oh Hell No!" and returns to class. How do these things get so complicated?
**Until the Halloween Dance, when boys got in the mix.

Mean Girls

So after the last post you all went out right away and got Mean Girls and have watched it, right? Well in case you didn’t, here’s the trailer. Once you’ve seen the trailer you’ve pretty much seen the movie and spared yourself 2 hours of your life you can never get back:



In Hollywood, the phenomenon is called “Mean Girls.” In the land of School Psychology, we call it “Relational Aggression.” Anyone who has been to high school probably has first-hand experience with it, either as the victim, perpetrator (not my readers!), or more commonly, as a bystander. We just didn’t have a name for it back in high school.

I went to this seminar called “Mean Girls” a while back to learn about strategies I could use at my schools when I see this usually covert aggression. It’s far easier to see a bruise on a kid from a playground fight than it is to see the emotional pain from exclusion, ignoring, intimidation, eye rolling, and rumors. And differentiating between the “normal” ebb and flow of relationships and relational aggression can be difficult. Here is the method proposed about deciding when to intervene.

Intervene if the relational aggression is:

Severe
Traumatic
Ongoing, or involves a
Power Imbalance

“Conflict Management” or “Peer Mediation” is a commonly used intervention in schools. In some cases, this can be helpful for each girl to see the other girls’ side. In your run-of-the mill “my best friend’s cousin knows this guy who knows this kid whose going with the girl who heard you say you’re seeing my boyfriend” stuff, it is a good idea to sort out the truth and get the two girls in the same room to figure it out. I had a situation just the other day with the friendship loyalty situation—if you are her friend you are not my friend, so now we can’t hang out. We had a tearful peer mediation and the three are all friends again (For the time being. Middle school friendships can be dynamic).

But it becomes true “relational aggression”(RA) when the conflicts are severe, traumatic, ongoing, and involves a power imbalance. At this point, it’s no longer just a misunderstanding among friends, it is bullying. And if it’s relational aggression, conflict mediation is not appropriate. Why? Because it implies that the victim has a role in to conflict as well. If the victim is having rumors spread about her, is being intimidated, taunted, and excluded, then it’s not a conflict, it’s an imbalance of power.

What can schools do?

1. Identify how pervasive the problem is and what the dynamics are. Use an anonymous survey to find out where and when RA takes place. Survey what tactics are used (e.g. name calling, gossip, rumors spread, cyber bullying, exclusion, harassment for race, religion, or looks, physical aggression, watching someone taunt someone, writing a note/email/post on MySpace that wasn’t nice, etc.)

2. Review results of the survey and develop policies or procedures to specifically address RA (increase supervision in “hot spots,” determine consequences for RA, etc.)

3. Have class meetings or in-services about how to recognize and deal with RA. Role play positive behaviors such as good listening skills, expressing feelings, identifying key players in interactions, and teaching how to make good choices when you are a bully bystander, etc.

What can educators do?

1. Most children will not tell their parents or teachers they are being bullied because thy are afraid that word will get out that they “told” and the mean girls will heap more abuse on them. Look for indicators such as an unexplained reluctance to go to school, sleep disturbances, or vague physical complaints such as headaches and stomachaches that happen on school days.

2. Be available to listen and don’t downplay the importance of an incident. Empathize with the student when she is sharing something she sees as important (remember, something as simple as a note given to a boy that you like him or something can be devastating to a middle school girl)

3. Differentiate for students what is “Tattling” and what is “Telling.” If someone’s feeling sad or upset, then it’s “telling” and that’s okay. For older students, some sort of anonymous reporting may be in order, because the last thing a girl wants is for the mean girl to turn on her for “snitching” or tattling.

4. Check out this website for more suggestions and tips for parents and educators.

The Uglist Girl in School

When I was a junior in high school, I would pick up my friend along the way to school so we could ride together. She was not a morning person (still isn’t, btw). One morning, I got there a little early so instead of my usual honk, I came in for a minute. She looked the opposite of ready. She was near tears because she had a cowlick (I didn’t know what this was, but apparently it’s portion of your hair that always goes the wrong way) and it wasn’t cooperating. She exclaimed that she couldn’t go with me because she was “The Ugliest Girl in School.” And as a good best friend, I believe we scrambled around for a baseball hat or some gel or something because I totally understood. I had had a similar encounter the week before in which she had dyed my hair “Ash Blonde” and it turned out gray.* I was certain that this event would prohibit all boys from asking me to prom and ran to the store across town in a disguise to get some new hair dye right away.

We both thought the whole school was going to take note of our hair. Reality is, our classmates were probably thinking of their own new zit or how they were under or over developed, not our hair.**

What is it about adolescence that creates such sensitivity to what others think? Why did we feel like we were under a microscope by our peers? How did our peers influence our self-perceptions?

Research on Peer Influence

The debate about if peers or parents are more influential is still ongoing. There tends to be less polarity in the field, with the general consensus that it’s both. The question is how peers and parents are influential and how they interact.

It is true that adolescence is a time when peers play an increasingly important role in the lives of youth. This role can be positive or negative, but developing friendships is an important process that helps adolescents construct their identities. Identities are basically the stories adolescents tell about themselves, and sometimes come with identifying labels, such as “jock,” “troublemaker,” “nerd,” “popular,” or “ugliest girl in school.”


But research also suggests that parent relationships are not necessarily undermined by peer relationships. And while it seems that teens are influenced by their peers, parents clearly continue to be influential in their lives. Friends come and go, but parents are there to stay. Also, teens tend to choose those who are similar to them in values, so if a parent and teen have a healthy relationship, then they will likely seek out healthy relationships with peers.

The problem with the notion of peer pressure/affiliation with negative peers “causing” misbehavior is the relationship is correlational, and not necessarily causal. A recent meta-analysis of the literature suggests that peer influence on drug use is overestimated. Basically, if your kid already values doing drugs, they will select similar drug-using friends, and therein lies the correlation. Why that may be valued is complex. I know of not one behavior that is directly caused by only one event or person. Child development is far too complex for that. Certainly no one was pressuring us to wear our hair in certain ways. This is why the term “peer pressure" is misleading. It can be misleading for a number of reasons.

1) We never referred to other students as “peers” so the term “peer pressure” was somewhat lost on us. To this day, I have never heard a child or adolescent say the word “peer” in reference to a classmate.

2) The term “peer pressure” evoked an image of random unknown classmate emerging from the dark shadows of the locker room to sell us drugs. That never happened.

3) We in fact mocked lessons on how to combat “peer pressure” by well meaning adults. My mom, bless her heart, bought this book for parenting teens when I was in high school called “Get out of my life! But first can you drive me and Cheryl to the mall?” or “Teen Talk!” or something like that. My best friend and I got our hands on it and have never laughed so hard. This is a sample script the parent was supposed to teach the teen to resist peer pressure for drugs.

Pressuring Teen: Hey man, want to smoke some grass?
Pressured Teen: I don’t smoke grass, I mow it!
Pressuring Teen: Ok, man!

So. Off. The. Mark. On so many levels. It just doesn’t happen that way.

As long as there are teenagers, there will be a debate about how influential peers and parents are during this developmental period. When we figure this out, we may also be able to answer important questions about fashion, hair, and other adolescent fads. I, for one, am dying to know how an entire generation of my peers convinced each other that tight jeans, leg warmers, fluorescent tops, and giant bangs were a good fashion idea. We know the parents weren’t responsible for that.



* *Shudder* I still get chills remembering looking in the mirror and seeing my 16 year old self look exactly like my grandmother.

**Maybe. I still contend, to this day, that it would have been obvious if I showed up with gray hair. My friend, to this day, says it wasn’t that bad.