'Resilience against bullying'

[youarenotkiddingme]

My ds secondary have been running workshops.

Probably my fault but I got the wrong end of the stick about the content and (assumed?) was under the belief it was to support parents in supporting their children who are bullied and to discuss the recent crackdown and how the school are tackling the issue.

I can honestly say overall the school are great with bullying and tackle it rather than deny it happens.

Email today to say they are running a later session for parents who work and it's entitled "resilience to bullying".

The wording seems odd to me? I teach my ds to ignore, report etc but don't think I should have to encourage him to being resilient to being called a spastic and retard.

Would I be that parent if I emailed and asked what they mean by it and say I'd rather know how they will treat disablist language as seriously as they do racist etc rather than be trained to make my ds more resilient to it?

I'd be 'that parent' ahead of you in the queue to ask what on earth they meant by resilience to being verbally or physically attacked.

Can you go to the session to ask awkward questions?

Is there a breakdown of the course content? It’s not great wording but it may be about not just being robust enough to accept it but being resilient enough to challenge, report, etc.

From the title I would guess it is about helping the young people to cope with bullying (maybe who they can get support from, how to get support, how to deal with any of the problems they encounter in school)

I would hope that the school is still going to deal with bullying especially serious bullying, racist language etc, but dealing with the bully and helping people to cope with being bullied sometimes require two different strategies-so maybe helping young people to deal with bullying (whilst the adults in school deal with the bullies)

I agree that it is a strange title as can be read different ways (my interpretation was very different to yours OP). I would probably gently enquire about what the content of the workshop would be and what the aims/hoped for outcomes are

I was told my son needed to “learn resilience” in the face of bullying because he’s autistic, it would help him in later life.

I responded by saying that unless he wanted to be the next Conor McGregor it’s unlikely learning to put up with being punched, kicked, beaten and abused on a daily basis will help him in later life

@Smeddum that is awful! It really frustrates me when people tell a child to "be resilient" or "learn resilience"

Children need to be taught these skills and sometimes they take a while and for some children they will need a lot of extra help to develop their resiliency

A teacher acquaintance of mine has often reported saying this to her students if they cry....she often cries/is emotional over things like not winning games and last time she did this someone told her to get some emotional resilience. Which was probably quite cruel but I hope it made her stop and think next time she was going to say it to a 7-8 year old!

@tessica2 I hope it did make her think!

Being and teaching resilience is such an important part of dealing with bullying. Bullying and nasty behaviour is the fault of the child doing it and SHOULD be dealt with by the school and adults. BUT everyone should teach their child to be resilient. Such an important part of mental health for life. When a child was ‘bullying’ my child in primary school I took the six weeks holidays to instil in him the ‘rules’ in the book The Optimistic Child by Martin E P Seligman. It really helped him. A very good book.

Smeddum Sorry for your sons experience. Obviously the word resilience was used totally incorrectly in that circumstance.

@House4 thank you. I actually agree with everything you said in your post above.

I do try and teach my children resilience, sadly even the wee ones have experienced bullying already (all 3 kids and I are autistic), but I teach them that to help protect them.

I imagine resilience in not taking to heart things which are said/done after the teachers have dealt with the bully. The bullying has still happened even if it 8s dealt with and stopped, and it’s important that the bullied child learns to realise it is not their fault and the horrible things which might have been said are not true.

Smed my ds has autism and mild CP. Totally agree with you that out children shouldn't have to be resilient to bullying. I would like him to be taught it's a hate crime and he has rights.

Although his autism is helpful here and he's quite happy to be vocal about it! He'll leave the classroom and take himself to his key worker and happily refuse to be in a classroom where X is calling him Y!

I'm glad others read into it differently - it means I feel more comfortable challenging exactly what the course content is.

The first email called t anti bullying meeting and then the same one about same meeting called it "building resilience".

I’m ALWAYS ‘that’ parent and I agree with you.

I would be uncomfortable with the wording also and would want to know exactly what they mean by that. No child should have to tolerate bullying in any form, therefore they shouldn’t need resilience in that area.

My son was bullied as a kid, I went to a meeting once at the school about it. DS and I were walking along the corridor when another kid said some very abusive things to him, things I would not accept being said to me as an adult. We go into the meeting and I told the teachers straight, and they still said “your son needs to manage his emotions better” really??? I hate bullies.

youare, you know I am completely for protecting the interests of the less powerful people in any situation (whether SN, or just a bit vulnerable). But having 3 girls, one with MLD, one going through ASD pathway that is taking forever and a year, and one just being bog standard 'nice' in year 4, I think that the most loving, empowering thing we can go as parents is instill emotional resilience in our children.

Emotional resilience is not putting your fingers in your ears and chanting "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me!" It's helping your child to see the dynamics that lead to these situations and how they may, albeit unwittingly, contribute to being treated badly by others, and crucially, how they can change that dynamic.

An example would be DD3. She was upset because friend B got cross because she tried to help her clean friend A's earring, and said she was interfering. DD3 just wanted to be helpful to friend A too. Friend A was blissfully content that her earrings were being washed, while DD3 and friend B were arguing. DD3 couldn't understand why friend B hated her now.

I was explaining to DD3 that friend A has become so important in their eyes, that everyone is fighting to do her jobs, and they're being unkind to each other, to get into A's good books. All she had to do, is to stop playing that game, and treat A normally. Stop picking up her litter, cleaning her earrings, etc. Make her on her level again. It takes some emotional resilience to refuse to be her pixie, but it will work. And it did.

DD2 had a situation with some girls who weren't being real friends. They were tolerating her, then pushing her out, picking her up, dropping her. When she told me she wasn't sure they were actually friends, I agreed with her. We talked and I said "the only way to stop them doing it is to stop letting them". Make the choice. Decide that they don't get to use you. That's emotional resilience. Choose to accept that they've shown you who they are, be nice, it's ok to spend time occasionally, but stop following, stop chasing, don't put them in that position of power.

We need to give our children the tools to take power back, assertively.

I was horrendously bullied as a child, and I so wish I'd been given real tools for emotional resilience, instead of "sticks and stones...." - I used to think "words flipping do hurt!!!!"

I can honestly say the school are great with regards to usenof non pc language in some respects. Use of racist or homosexual language is punished heavily with a no questions asked approach (and the reporter is believed regardless) and no excuses of "I didn't understand what it meant or know it wasn't ok" being accepted.

Yet our experience is disablist language is punished far more gently and the child is told its unacceptable but it's believed they didn't realise.

I have to say when I raised this with a governor in response to a whole school email about bullying he was absolutely brilliant and agreed with me.

I am going to ask what the workshop content is. Then I'll raise concerns dependent on response if necessary.

Lougle I get that and do explain to ds a lot how he can create situations due to his autism and need to control. We also do work with him in resilience.

I don't need a workshop telling me how support him that way (so won't go if that's the content!) but do want to highlight that most of the bullying he suffers is other kids thinking it's acceptable to call him disablist names.

Ahh, got you.

It depends what is meant, but I do think some skills can be helpful in terms of emotional resilience. There are kids and adults who cry and get upset at every perceived slight, such as a kid not playing with them, and make it a big deal. There are some kids and adults that you know will attract the bullies, and I am not talking about things that can not be changed such as disability, but about the way we react and our non verbal language. Personally I could have done with some lessons in this as a kid.

So as an adult I was bullied for a short time and it was my DP who got me to see that I was giving them the power to do this. Once I stopped engaging with them at all, it all stopped.

Oh DS is certainly a child that attracts bullies. He has poor emotional resilience. He also has poor socials communication and they know he can't argue back.
These things are being worked on with his keyworker and me with a written plan in place.

I’m in two minds about this.

One of mine was bullied horribly in school, and at the time I would have been grateful for any tips offered to deal with it.

On the other hand it does seem to put the onus on bullied pupils.

I would ask if they have a second one planned, about how to deal with frustration without becoming a bully. Wouldn’t that be helpful, too?

I wish my school had taught me resilience with respect to bullying. They did (eventually) manage to stop it by separating the children concerned but not before it totally knocked my self-esteem. Maybe the wording is bad but as someone who was bullied I do feel I would have benefited from help to remove the fear that it would happen again.

I would be inclined to believe the wording is incorrect, rather than the message they are trying to give out.

I would hope that they are trying to give the message that it is possible for children who are being bullied to have some control over the events that lead to the bullying and the act itself.

By control I mean being able to recognise it in the first place, knowing instinctively that it's wrong, knowing that they do not have to put up with it, knowing that it's not them (it's the bullies), and being ready to not accept something that simply isn't right.

Understanding what is bulling and what isn't and knowing exactly the steps to take if something happens to them and what support is available.