Navigating A World Of Bullies

How do we teach our children – and ourselves – not to act in anger and with aggression when the planet feels like a less civil place these days? After talking to the experts (and taking a good, hard look in the mirror), writer Mira Jacob is figuring it out

- Mira Jacob

As kids, many of us were offered exactly two strategies to deal with bullies: turn the other cheek or punch hard once. Both of these strategies felt faulty to me. For one thing, most of the people who’d turned the other cheek seemed like they’d spent a lifetime regretting not punching hard once. For another thing, even the most perfectly executed retaliation was not likely to result in a bully-proof forevermore. By the time I was a teenager, I was pretty sure the only way to stop contending with bullies was to become an adult.

Today, like most other parents, what I teach my eight-year-old son about bullying is more pre-emptive in nature. I instil that he must be careful with other people’s feelings. I tell him to be kind because it’s the right thing to do, to take a breath to figure out what he thinks instead of just going with the crowd. But sometimes I feel like I’m offering him a rubber ducky in a sea of fury.

Whether on the nightly news or on Facebook, stories about adults taking their aggression to extremes are everywhere.

There is dissonance between how we act and how we want our kids to act. Lately I can’t help but wonder: How are we supposed to teach our kids to be better humans when we can barely politely navigate the smallest interactions with one another? The truth is, we adults are not doing so great on the mutual-respect front. According to a recent study done by Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate with KRC Research, 75% of respondents believe incivility has reached crisis levels. That’s up five percent from January 2016. According to the survey, the vast majority of us are feeling the heat in our personal lives. Whether it comes at us while we’re driving (56%) or shopping (47%), or via social media (25%), aggression has developed into a regular occurrence.