I’m going to apologize right off the start because I don’t have many photos of this one. Grab those reading glasses and a glass of your favorite (preferably alcohol containing) Beverage and settle in.
Creating a Bully
I have three kids and they all have different lifestyles and needs. Bullying is a part of life engrained in me from growing up during the 80’s and 90’s. The “softer generation” has an issue with teaching kids about failure. Leveraging my roughly cumulative 28 years of education.
- 6 years of being bullied through elementary school
- 2 years in junior high
- 4 years of high school
- 2 years in tech school for Ford Motor Company
- 4 years in Undergrad for a degree in molecular neuroscience
- 4 years of medical school
- 2 years of masters degree in Cyber Security
- 3 years of Family medicine residency
- 1 year of Sports Medicine Fellowship
I feel like I have a solid grasp on the concept of going to school and dealing with bullies, but I digress
Bullies are created by their parents. Its plain and simple. If parents are overly strict, over utilize physical punishment, or if kids are exposed to an extreme amount of violence in tv or video games at an early age, they develop unhealthy strategies to deal with failure. This is not an opinion. This is fact based on validated research that has been peer reviewed.
Bullying
Every kid explores their environment. This includes pushing boundaries with kids at school and in the community. The bullying develops when they receive positive feedback for doing things the easy way. If a kid steals a bike because they want a bike, and the kid simply takes physical abuse for the punishment, they associate physical attention with the act of stealing. They never make the connection between their actions and how it impacts everyone else. Kids desire attention from parents. This doesn’t matter if it is negative or positive. They simply desire to be the center of attention.
You can see this developmentally at an early age. Sleep training is a critical turning point for toddlers. They love to cry their tiny heads off until mom coms back in the room. They associate the negative behavior with the positive effect of having mom give them attention. It is a balance to foster the environment of stability with that of self soothing behavior. The goal of sleep training is to teach the child that the mom and dad are still there when shit hits the fan, but they have the ability to overcome their emotions on their own.
Pattern Recognition
Bullying is an extension of this behavior pattern. Kids act out and direct anger or physical abuse to others because it forces adults to give them attention. Ultimately, they crave the attention to validate their emotion. As they age, they slowly learn to handle their own emotion in more constructive manner but not all bullies will progress. There are numerous theories on child development, my personal favorite is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Which boils down to being unable to move up the pyramid if you fail to meet milestones of the lower step. Case in point – if you are homeless and constantly searching for food and shelter, you simply cannot devote resources to searching for things like employment or maintaining your health.
The Infamous Bully
This is sadly the meat of the blog here. There are numerous stories of work related bullying and school based trauma. We all grow up based on the environment we live in and bullying, for those of us who are currently parents, likely had a bully. There are some fun memes that mock the fact that bullying in schools has dropped off at nearly the same rate as school shootings have risen. I’m not going to argue this point. However, I am here to tell you that bullying does serve a purpose. I understand this is an unpopular opinion but none the less, being told you failed and being reminded of it constantly can be a positive learning point.
First of all, school shootings have been correlated to bullying. It is easily demonstrated by this graphic –
The second fact is that school shootings seem to be increasing when school bullying is decreasing. As much as we would like to blame bullying for the increase in violence in our school aged children, it simply isn’t true.
Food for thought
The more we avoid the confrontation with our children, the more they learn to manipulate. The more we rely on reactionary methods to parenting, the more they associate attention with the negative action. As with all things in life, balance is a must. Finding the balance is always dependent on your own situation. However, I cannot stress the importance of communication with your kids. There are numerous studies out there now reinforcing the concept of soft parenting but there are issues as well.
Kids need rules. They need to know what is expected of them and they need to know the consequences of their actions. Where current society is lacking in balancing this equation is “accountability”. This is why the older we get, the more we hate people in general. We assume no one has accountability for their actions and they act out of selfish desires. It’s kid of fun to think about this in reality. If you knew no one was going to hold you accountable for your actions and the worst thing that would happen is more training at work, or perhaps additional class work, you wouldn’t really care about the consequences. You would just keep escalating your behavior until you reached a point where you snapped. The unfortunate side of this is that we fail to see the consequences of our actions that OTHER PEOPLE have to deal with.
If we fail to teach our kids accountability, they will have narcissistic tendencies and toxic traits. The difficulty in this, is that society needs to hold itself accountable. Historically, this was the role of the bully. Since we have essentially eradicated them, it makes sense that we see a rise in these other kinds of violent acts carried out according to an individual manifesto.
Examples
I would challenge anyone to google where our tax dollars go… There is almost no accountability with the government. They have numerous toxic traits and basically just act in the interest of prolonging their own political careers. We keep enabling people to be homeless, violent, antisocial, or even outright unhealthy. At what point do we say enough is enough? We need to hold each other accountable. Honesty is not a negative trait but yet we punish it through the infamous cancel culture if we don’t agree with that specific narrative. We ignore science in place of more convenient personal preferences such as pronouns and gender.
The point being, I will fight to the death to support your right to identify however you feel you need to, including as an attack helicopter. However, you have no right to force anyone to recognize your preference. Sadly, it is two sides of the same coin. You either bully someone into submitting how they view you, or they bully you into submitting to their interpretation of who you are to them. We purposely ignore the existential conflict within ourselves and alleviate the animosity by confabulating an alternate narrative. We then, unjustifiably, force the world to validate it or face retribution. What we should be asking ourselves is – “how will my actions affect the lives of others” or better yet, “how will my choices improve the world for others?”
The vast majority of people are living for themselves because they were taught from an early age this is how you get attention. Scream loud enough and long enough, mom will come back in the room…
Bottom Line
I am aware this entire blog, based on facts, can be interpreted as a micro-aggression. However, based on more facts, the macro-aggressions bullying perpetrated seems to have inadvertently been tied to forcing society to be more accountable for their actions. How do we break the cycle of selfishness and start building towards the top of Maslow’s pyramid?
Lived the article, so true!