Empathy key to fighting bullying
What a bully most desperately needs is something that $23 million in government funding can’t buy. It is relationships. Both the bullies and the bullied need healthy relationships with caring and responsible adults. They need a thousand caring eyes, listening ears, compassionate hearts and open minds.
Without a strong attachment to a nurturing adult who values them, children will seek relationships with their peers in immature, inappropriate, or even violent ways.
If adults want to protect children from becoming bullies and being bullied, they must be willing to engage them, nurture them, and offer them protection from this often confusing, difficult world in which we live.
Every child longs to be in the hands of someone strong enough and wise enough to provide care and protection. Every youth wants to be appreciated by a respected adult.
While important, it is not enough for schools to initiate anti- bullying policies, make reporting anonymous and offer peer mediation. Parents, teachers, school administrators, neighbours, members of faith communities and even law enforcement officials will need to establish and cultivate connections within which children and youth can feel safe.
Bullying is an attempt to establish a relationship — usually not with the one being bullied — but the bully does not know how to interact or is fearful of the vulnerability that is a part of relationships. A bully attempts to get close to one person by pushing away from another, often without even being aware of what is happening. As parents and guardians notice their children pushing away from them, the need to reconnect and claim their relationship is crucial. We also need to recreate the extended families, neighbourhoods and villages of the past in which other adults helped parents care for children. Day-care settings and schools aren’t enough.
In our current cultural context, school and day- care workers are expected to provide children adequate attention for significant portions of their days.
Children and youth need more attention and attachments than can be provided in these settings and so they turn to one another, creating the context in which bullying occurs.
Parents and guardians need to seek healthy and safe environments in which their children can be cared for and given attention by other responsible adults. Adults must take an interest in children other than their own and be supportive of parents.
Faith communities can provide support systems for parents and families. Adult members of faith communities have an opportunity and responsibility for developing relationships with the children and youth in their midst.
Bullying can be seen as a spiritual crisis as well as a psycho- social crisis and, therefore, worthy of a faith community’s attention.
Parents, teachers and administrators should work to establish healthy relationships with one another as well as strong relationships with students. As children and youth see a respectful, unified approach from both of these powerful forces in their lives, they will feel safe in the relationships.
If parents and schools set up inappropriate, competitive relationships with one another, students will reject both and begin to develop inappropriate, competitive attachments to one another. Now is the time for parents and guardians to establish healthy relationships with their children until they are mature enough to care for themselves. Now is the time for other concerned adults to provide support to parents and their children. Now is the time for the village of adults to stop pointing fingers at one another and give bullies and the bullied a model of caring and empathy. Amy Crawford is Children’s Program Coordinator for The United Church of Canada.