Do you teach your child to hit back?

[SweetBobby]

If yes, why?
If no, why?

I do and I feel pretty strongly about it. Being able to stand up for yourself in life is absolutely vital.

YABU- No I don't
YANBU- Yes I do

You don't need to have a large number of feral children to ruin a school environment. One or two bad apples will be enough, particularly in an LA where the softly softly approach is taken.

In the old days yes. However we live in a rather different world now.

In simple terms telling your child to hit back doesn't seem so bad. However where do you draw the line. Children, kids, young adults these days dont have the same lines they did 20/30/40 years ago. Do you want your child to be stabbed (Entirely possible)? Do you want your child to be beaten by a gang and kicked unconscious? Do you want revenge attacks? Do you want them to be a single punch statistic where they end up in prison for that one situation where they swung and cracked someone's skull open?

Now you could say this is more about little kids and it wouldn't get to that but teaching a child how to deal with something when they are younger gives them a good chance of honing their awareness skills for when the consequences are more severe.

For the record none of my children were in much position to fight back. Not everyone is. I would 100% rather know they have the ability to deal with or escape a situation than be brave enough to swing a punch.

All the people against telling your children to hit back must never have been bullied themselves or had their child bullied.

I teach mine to never bully or start a fight but if someone hits you first then you hit back harder. Bullies pick on who they think are weak, who they can intimidate, that's where they get their kicks and how they think they're big and hard. Put them in their place and 9/10 times they'll stop.

Well I have news for you. Research shows context doesn't matter. It's the engagement of violence that is the deciding factor.

I really would caution using Google as your sources

Evidence links or you're blowing smoke.

This is almost word for word the traditional response a huge number of parents over the last 50 years would say.

Can't you see that things have changed. You child may just be brave enough to stand up to that bully. He may just be the one kids who gets to tell the story of how he punched the school bully. But eventually the bully in a future situation becomes a kid who brings a knife to school. Or he becomes the kid who brings his gang of thugs with him. Or you child stands up for himself again, connects and ends up with a manslaughter charge.

Why not teach them how to ensure they can avoid such situations.

I don't, because I think it's an unhealthy and dangerous way of solving conflict or bullying, but my bullied child wouldn't have done it anyway. My approach was to spend five years riding the school leadership like a fucking donkey, citing the equality act and insisting that they fulfill the bare minimum of their duty of care. We did withdraw our child from PE when the school point blank refused to engage with the idea of preventing him from being beaten up in the changing rooms. We also got a member of staff disciplined for lying about witnessing a punch in the face during a lesson (unfortunately for the teacher, the bully had already admitted it).

I don't judge how other parents choose to deal with bullying, because I know how devastating it is to have your child's mental health completely collapse because they are being tortured at school. But teaching them to hit back wouldn't have worked for us or our child.

You searched self defense. The algorithm is set to determine the most common use . The most common search of the phrase is used in the case of someone trying to distinguish if an assault between adults involved in possibly an assault.

The definition appropriate here is what is the first principle of first defence. I have confidence you can search this yourself.

You are welcome

Because you can't avoid bullies. If a bully targets you, how do you avoid them? Tell me what you'd do and I'll see if its worth telling my children to do the same. My eldest has been relentlessly bullied and the school were spoken to more times than I can count, the only thing that stopped the bullies was him fighting back, my dad was bullied, he fought back, it stopped, I was bullied, I fought, it stopped, in my adult life, I stand up for myself and they back off. I'd rather my kids go down fighting than not having confidence to stand up for themselves. Most bullies are not carrying knives and are just weak cowards who get off on making others scared of them.

My dds have been taught to hit back but only when they follow the rules

1st time don't hit back tell an adult

2nd time don't hit back tell an adult and insist they stop the other child hurting them

3rd time hit back

They have been taught how to hit and where to aim

Funnily enough the only two kids dd1 has ever had to hit due to them bullying her are now very close friends with her

@Marblesbackagain Well, if any "Researcher" had ever contacted me then I'd have told them that if I hadn't been brought up not to accept abuse from anyone and to defend myself, then I wouldn't have grown up into the type of woman who walked away immediately from my ex husband the very first time he hit me. I was 24 and newly married and because I'd been brought up to defend myself and stand up to bullies, I left him straight away, saving myself from years of possible abuse. I'd been brought up to know I was no bully's victim, add that to your research!

The cleverest bullies are the ones who get other children to do their dirty work and then sit back looking innocent when trouble erupts . This sort of bullying is usually mental bullying. And of course it could not possibly be that child at the bottom of it all according to the teachers .

@Whatalife88 Well said!

Your post is sad and I am sorry to hear what you have been through.

But respectfully this situation is a child the perpetrator is a child. It isn't comparable

So glad you and your family live in a nice area and never reported any bullies.

thinks is, I also live in a nice area. So nice, people flock here on holiday and even buy second homes!

keep polishing those rose tinted spex

@Marblesbackagain Thank you, but some posters were discussing how being taught to hit back and defend yourself as a child affected you as an adult. Also, the perpetrator may be a child but so is the victim.

I once watched a child in the playground spinning round and round. As they spun, they accidentally smacked a child who was running past. The running child stopped, turned round, and punched the spinning one in the face, splitting their lip.

Guess what the puncher had been taught by their idiotic parents? To hit back if anyone hits you.

The fact that you say 'game on' is very telling.

Personally I would feel no pleasure at all in feeling justified in being violent. I guess that's why kids are like that, because its clear some parents actually relish the idea of their kids punching someone else.

My kids, like me would be horrified at the idea of getting into a fight.

How old are your kids?

IIRC, you wrote in one of the opening pages of the thread that your kids school were proactive in dealing with bullies etc.

How do you think your kids will approach situations outside of school when they’re older? Pub fights, people starting on them for no reason…whatever the scenario, there will be no teachers to tell, no adult to go to (as they will be the adult). How do you think they’ll manage in those situations?

My kids are teenagers. And as adults in an aggressive situation they would do the same thing. Walk/run away, use defensive measures (my 18 year old has black belt in karate) call the police, speak to a security guard/pub manager etc. Getting involved in a pub fight will get both parties thrown out of and barred from any decent pub. I literally cannot believe that so many people think retaliation to unprovoked violence is the solution. As others have said above a single unlucky punch could cause a death and the courts won't give a shit that the victim started it. I've warned my 14 year old son about exactly this as he is a gentle giant who literally wouldn't know his own strength.

I don't live in a place where this is the norm at all. I wouldn't be going near any place that did.

Do you live somewhere very rough?

So you don’t live in or enter any city or town in the UK at night? Because fights and confrontations happen all the time and I genuinely don’t know where someone lives that they have no knowledge of this.

I am in a European capital. Do I see fights the way you described no I don't.

The only that I would avoid city is when England come over to play 🤷‍♀️

Ok so if you avoid the city when England play, you’re no doubt avoiding it because of how those fans tend to behave with their fighting and general anti-social behaviour.

Take how they behave in your city, add more English people into the mix, and that’s your average UK city on any weekend night (or weekday, come to think of it).