I know I ABU but I soooo want to stop this child getting this award.....

[amck5700]

Just read in our primary school minutes that a child who bullied my son and encouraged others to do so is probably getting a national award for sport and my blood is boiling.

They are now both in High School but we chose to put my son to a further away school becasue of the way this boy and the others made my son (and other kids in the class too) feel.

I sooooo want to find out who the award is from and tell them what this boy is actually like. I know I can't do it and I know it is unreasonable to want to do it but still.......

Piglet - I did complain to the head, I wrote a letter to him which resulted in me going up to the school for a meeting. It was a bit of a waste of time (which I knew it would be) but I wanted the complaint lodged and in writing.

Popumkin - no, it didn't read like that honestly ;)

Mary - I now exactly where you are coming from and the reasonable part of me knows that - and it will do society as a whole good for something to be done with him. My OH said the same, that sometimes the most horrible kids grow up to be such nice adults.

The school did manage his behaviour - the physical stuff stopped quite quickly but the snidey comments etc are harder to deal with and then when others joined in, it got to the point where my son was so anxious they thought he had aspergers and needed psychological support. He couldn't go round and play in the playground after school becasue of these kids either.

I wouild bear a huge big grudge too but you have to put your game face on here. Your ds will learn from this, sadly, that its not always the nice guys who win, and just because someone is/was a complete shite, they can't excel. Most Big Bosses I have had would eat their own young to win or get ahead.

Think of it as a life lesson - learn to 'play the game' to succeed but dont become the bastard. If you are seen to be bitter, your son will pick that up too, and I'm sure you7d rather him think 'good for him, but I'm n a far better place now...'

AnywayN boys I was at school with who won football awards and scholarships/apprenticeships did eff all academically, didn't make it as players and ended up in admin jobs still basking in tarnished glory from 30 years ago.

It just seems to me that there must be some method somewhere that works to stop bullying and yet it still persists and schools seem to pussy foot about the issue and tinker with it and I really don't know why.

Surely there must be some successful method that could be standardised and rolled out across the country - becasue from what you read on threads here, there seem to be continuing issues everywhere.

I think you need to stop obsessing on this child and his family and move on. By reading the minutes you have wound yourself up to no good end. You want him to fall flat on his face but he is making a success of his school life at last. Get over it.

Frontpaw - you are right.

However, I'm not even going to mention it to my son anyway. He doesn't have to deal with this kid or his cronies on a day to day basis anymore.

Knowing our luck this kid will end up making it big and will be swanning about in his big car etc in a good few years time. So my younger sons come back (he is a bit more mouthy than his brother) of "see in the future when we are grown up and meet again, there is only one thing about me you need to remember.........I will be wanting fries with that!" will be the wrong prophecy.

I always talk to my children about this sort of thing by saying "X has terrible trouble behaving, he is going to struggle when he is older if he doesn't learn to manage his behaviour/the way he talks/whatever. Isn't it great that you know how to behave, that you can sit still in class, that you can make real friends instead of having to force people to like you because they are afraid of you". That sort of thing.

And I excuse the weekly "best pupil" prizes by saying: "he really needs to get some encouragement as he finds behaving well so difficult".

I think it does children no harm to try to look at "bullying" and "bad behaviour" as something to feel sorry for the perpetrators about, as soon as they are old enough.

And I'm not excusing it - I think it is part of teaching children to deal with it.

I presume anyone making a flippant comment like get over it has never had to deal with their kids lives being made a living hell by another kid. OP knows she cant actually do anything about it but she is just venting.

Your kid getting bullied is absolutely awful. I would rather take a thousand beating than for my son to be bullied......and mental bullying is just as bad as the physical stuff too.

lovely laduree - I know you are right about needing to move on - I don't think i am obsessing - don't really think about him any more until someone brings his continuing shitty behaviour to their kids up in conversation. I think if it was an award for what he is doing now I don't think I would be quite as annoyed, the award is for last year when he was still being nasty to my son.......and his parents think the sun shines out his bumhole despite being called into the school several times and turning up apologising at my door!

Thank you betty :)

Mary - I agree and I have had to explain to my sons that getting star pupils is not necessarily a good thing as it is mostly used to reward children who don't know how to behave and probably don't have very good home lives. I tell them how lucky they are and we reward them ourselves for their excellent reports etc.

I needed to do something to explain why my son who was described as hard working , respectful, clever, supporting and kind, who is in the top academic group for everything has not had star pupil for nearly 3 years.

you really have to let this go OP.

i was bullied in primary school. it was horrible. but you know what made it ten times worse? the grudge my mum still holds against the child that did it. yes that child is now an adult and we haven't seen or heard of her in over 13 years but my mum will still bring up that 'little bitch' and wish her all sorts of bad luck etc. it's pathetic if i'm honest. you've moved your son and he's no longer being bullied. leave that other child to do whatever the hell he's going to do and stop prolonging the pain for your son. i hope he hasn't heard you talking like this. it wont help him get over things. trust me.

Tired - it's good to hear the other side of the story - no, we haven't let him hear us speak about him at all.

I think it is difficult as a parent to forgive people who hurt our children and I do sympahise with your mum - have you told her how it makes you feel though?

Yes amck, I remember an awful year where both ds1 and ds2 had got two awards each, and dd who was an angelic child hadn't got one at all. It was awful seeing her face each week coming out of school knowing that yet again she had been passed over.

I hate those weekly awards. And i don't think they work either - ds2 informed me once that he was going to cause trouble for a week, and then be good to get one - and he did . Even the kids can see through them.

I do think, though, that it is very important to keep behaviour in school and outside school (at sport/scouts/drama class/whatever) separate, as a child who is a nightmare in school may turn out to be a good leader on the sports field, which will in turn make him a better adult. Which is what we have to hope for for all the children.

I can empathize having been bullied throughout my time at Primary at Secondary school, but if I was on the awarding body and someone sent me an email detailing what he was 'really like' I'd probably but it down to a jealous/petty parent and absolutely ignore it.

it's hard to bring it up with my mum. she is still so very angry about it. it's complicated by the fact that we have a difficult relationship and i think some of my mum's behaviour at the time made things worse for me. this is NOT me saying the bully wasn't to blame. she was horrible, and i do remember some of the things that happened but if you listened to my mum talking about it, you would think this girl had actually killed me. i cant imagine how my mum reacted at the time and i do have sympathy for the teacher that had to dea with her (my mum) as i can only imagine how unwilling to see the other parent's side of things she was.

i am not saying that you should have ignored what was happening. i certainly would not accept my child being bullied, but i think it's really important to remember the facts of the situation and not get caught up in the emotions. the facts in my situation were that a child was nasty to another child without knowing what effect it was having on me. in my mum's head it was a monster attacking her baby (understandable lioness reaction) i think this made it harder for her to get me the help i needed. no teacher can arrange meetings between two parents when one is looking for blood. sorry i've gone way of topic here. i didn't mean to.

Freaky - strangely, I think I am annoyed at the school - it's like they want good publicity at any cost. I think if I was the Head (who is well aware of this boys behaviour) then I would feel morally obliged to let the awarding body know and then it wouldn't be a jealous parent. But then maybe I just want them to do the dirty work and why shouldn't they get the reflected glory as clearly the work done by the teacher has had an impact.

Mary, maybe we should just wait till he is a big shot and then sell the story to The Sun :o

The best revenge is living well.

Obnoxious twat might be good at sport, but he's not a very nice person. Your DS is, and therefore your DS is the better of the two. Don't focus on extrinsic awards, focus on how much nicer your DS is to be around. Would you prefer to be the mum of obnoxious twat even if he wins awards? No? Then you're the winner.

No problem tired it's a really interesting point that has made me think about what we did at the time. After the first bout of bullying came out and the parents of the kids involved were called to the school, I had this boys parents at my door and at the playground with the other parents profusely apologising and actually crying - I did feel sorry for them cos actually as hurt as my son was, i'd rather have my child bullied than them be a bully.

Anyhoo, they were all keen for me to let them know if there were any other instances.........but when there was and i told them all of a sudden they didn't want to know and this boys Dad in particular was quite aggressive (the apple doesn't fall far from the tree). Anyway it continued as low level sneaky, underhand bullying for a further 2 and a half years.

After the 2nd major incident when the school called the parents in again, I asked to be included so that I could explain the impact that their childrens behhaviour was having on my son - not to fight or rant, just to explain but the school wouldn't allow it. To be honest I still think it would have helped but was unwilling to approach the parents directly by this point.

I think being told that your child was causing another child such anxiety that he wants (at age 10) to sleep in bed with his parents, would maybe make you a bit more diligent in dealing with it. He went from being a fairly social confident wee boy to a nervous child who would skulk about the playground keeping out of the way of his classmates and would never volunteer and answers in class in case they then laughed at him etc.

noble, well put!!

Thank you all, I actually feel a lot calmer now - although he still has a face I coundn't tire of punching - he'll need the money and success if he is ever to get a woman in his life..........god I'm a bitch!!! :o

Luckily my kids don't have my temprament and I can teach what I don't practice inside my head :)

It's great to just be able to vent without involving people that I actually know!

for your son. yes i was the same. the effect one child had on me made me isolate myself from the group that was my friends because she was such a strong character and they (aged 9 and 10) were fickle. i spent most of my last 2 years of school walking up and down beside a wall, some of the othet children would then call em a loner and billy no mates and of course to them i was because that's what they saw. they didn't see the whispered insults from the bully that told me everyone hated me. and of course wouldn't believe me if i told them because X was their friend now.

i understand how hard it can be to let go of this but my advice would be to take your lead from your son. if he is starting to feel ok and moving on then that's what matters right? i agree that the best revenge is to live well, although i dont like the word revenge because to me that's petty. seeking revenge in any form is like holding grudges or hating people- it EATS you up bit by bit and it is so draining of energy. dont get me wrong, there are times when i wish my ex would forget to put the handbrake on his car and that he wakes up to find it's rolled into a river but i try not to linger on those feelings and accept that him 'losing' doesn't mean i'm winning anything. it just means something bad happened to him because as the song says, the race is long but in the end it's only with ourselves.

saying move on sounds flippant but it really is the best advice. holding on to those bad feelings isn't helping you or your son and they certainly aren't affecting the bully so what's the point?

I think you need to let it go, he has won the award for being sporting not for being kind/nice/friendly. Hopefully winning the award will help his selfconfidence and him acheiving something positive will be a step towards him wanting to stop being a bully. It doesn't sound like he has a very happy homelife, maybe sport will be a way that he will gain positive role models unlike his agresive father.

I was bullied at primary school as an adult one of the boys who bullied me looked me up on facebook and sent me a message saying how very very sorry he was and how he still feels ashamed and regrets deeply what he had done. The boy who had bullied me had come out as being gay at secondry school and unfortunatly been badly bullied himself. I felt so sorry for him, it must be terrible to regret things that you did as a child, especially if you did them because it was a normal way to behave in your family or because you felt insecure in yourself.

Maybe the sport has been the making of this boy......

Spot on noble :)

Tired, i am glad that you have grown up into such a nice person and sorry for the struggle you had at school. I have been told that this boys father (the aggresive one) was actually bullied at school himself so was determined that his kids wouldn't be the same. Think he went too far.

The boy is still not a nice person but maybe he will be one day.

My son is thriving in his new environment and is regaining some of his former confidence in the less aggressive environment of his new school and is making new friends who don't already have him marked as a target. Unfortunately all the things he is good at were not "cool" or desired at primary but seem to be more recognised at High School. He came home beaming as a drawing he had done at school had gotten a bit of attention from his classmates with one of his new friends saying it was the best drawing he had ever seen by someone his age........and he got a class prize for drawing the faintest lines in tech!

He has a bright future in front of him and as I read somewhere once - blowing someone elses candle out doesn't make your own burn any brighter.

that is very true! (the candle thing)

so glad your ds is finding his confidence again ( i loved drawing too!). some take longer than others and you may find he never thinks of this other boy again or you may find it affects him down the line in ways you hadn't expected. as long as he knows it wasn't anything to do with who he is or anything he has done. bullies are bullies because they are bullies. they make victims not the other way round.