How do you teach your DC to deal with the mean kids?

[LadyCleathStuart]

I have two DC (8 and 5) both currently having issues at school with other children being horrible.

DD is in p1 and she is dealing with two girls taking against her, saying mean things and getting all of the other girls to leave her out.

DS is in p4 and dealing with one boy telling blatant lies about him to get the other kids to pick on him - stuff like DS actually contacted the creators of minecraft and got them to cancel this boys account - utter nonsense like that. (luckily it isn't working with them all but it just takes a couple to make poor DS feel like crap).

DH's approach is to tell them to be mean back so for instance if a girl calls DD weird she should call her something worse back and if a boy tries to hit DS then he should hit back harder etc.

I tend to go with the 'just ignore or tell the teacher' - although I must admit if it was me in real life I would name call back but I'm trying to take the higher ground here.

We are going to speak to the school but for now I'm looking for ideas on how Mumsnet handles these situations....

He needs to understand why they're behaving like this. Jealousy of him perhaps? A need for entertainment at someone else's expense because they don't understand it's mean to use someone for their entertainment?

Then to lightly brush them off with a silly remark. If he can possibly manage it.

It's so hard to find a balance though isn't it? You don't want to increase the drama by encouraging him to think they're being unspeakably horrible if they're doing 'normal' kids talk and encouraging him to be mean back but if he's very upset he will need adult help with them.

My daughters have experienced similar. I've always just immediately gone into the teacher with the names of the children and telling them what's happening. Best in my opinion to cut it out before it gets worse and I can't reasonably expect the teachers to know everything going on in a class of 30. I have also told mine to get loud when someone is being mean to them. I.e. stand up and say loudly I think you're being a bully/ I think you're being mean and to move away. Gets the attention of the adults who need to be alerted and might give the little darlings being shits a pause for thought being called out on it loudly.

My son has always said laugh pretend it's banter and don't take it seriously. He's in year 7 now and says it works with physical bullies too. Don't be a victim. However I was always champing at the bit to speak to school but I think his way worked

My dd had a girl being mean to her when she was in p1, age 5. It was heartbreaking, I discovered dd was writing notes saying 'I love 'mean girl'' thinking this would make her like her I just went straight to the teacher, I couldn't expect a 5yr old to deal with what was going on, and told dd to go to the teacher if anything else happened. We had a couple of further issues but ultimately school dealt with it, the other parents were notified, and it stopped.

I hope your school stamp down on things for both dd and ds.

I’m a P1 teacher and I honestly don’t know the right answer. Realistically to get them to get message and stop (as you would as an adult) you’d make a stand and do something back. In school that does just tend to escalate things and then the victim is getting into bother too because of what they’ve done back. Now I have my own child (not of school age yet) but I really don’t know what I’d tell him to do, probably just tell the teacher. Often as a teacher I know absolutely nothing about a lot of these events because they mostly happen in the playground. I also have to deal with 15,000 tales at the end of every break so it’s hard to decipher which one has actually been something and which hasn’t. All in all an impossible task 🙈 So many parents will complain, especially taking things above teacher level and going direct to the head saying their child is being bullied but no members of staff have ever been told about any of the incidents they’re talking about to be able to fix it. So yeah I’d go with tell an adult at the time while it’s happening rather than later so that they can do something about it.

Gosh I'm so glad you asked this as dealing with identical situations at the moment. I tell DS(7) to tell the mean boy to leave him alone and stop being a bully but it seems to make him carry on doing it more!

Following for ideas!

The school need to deal with it and you need to speak with them. IMO children need to be able to rely on adults to address this. Ive been to the teacher a few times over the years about this kind of thing and they have jumped on it. Also for my youngest they have worked on supporting positive relationships and widening friendship groups as well as dealing with mean behaviour. All her teachers have been all over it when I've made contact.