CHILDREN
My child is being bullied at school, what can I do?
Children come in all shapes and sizes, and some get left alone and others get teased or bullied. It can be quite subtle at times. We judge people, and children no less, on appearance, abilities, attributes, physical adeptness, on their language and communication skills, and on the way they are labeled such as ‘visually impaired’, ‘hyperactive’, ‘ADHD’, ‘dyslexic’, ‘gifted’! All these sources of information result in how we ‘perceive’ a child and there are likely to be consequences as the child is seen as ‘different’. The following commonly results; isolation and social distance, reduced social opportunity to join in with play and work activities, restricted opportunity for social contact, insults, name calling and ‘making fun of’ and refusal to work/play with someone. In suffering from bullying and teasing they react, ‘act out’ or withdraw, often achieve poorly, play truant, get rejected/excluded from school, which increases feelings of isolation resulting in poorer mental health and ultimately no way to maintain self esteem!
Your first step is to approach the school and ask them to recognise the problem. If you have done this there may be several reasons why things haven’t changed. These would need exploring and Learning Insights could help you with this. However it is also possible that your child has learning difficulties.
Children with learning difficulties can be observed clinically to be prone to; uncontrolled outbursts, impulsivity, poor self-monitoring, courting conflict, aggressive outbursts, non-compliance, inconsistent behaviour, unpredictability, poor communications, low insight, withdrawal and defiance. Add to this the ways in which the literature documents how the child with learning difficulties can be seen; irritating, misunderstanding, distractible, disorganised, clumsy/awkward, slow/dilatory, argumentative, disorganised, rigid/inflexible and misjudging. These factors alone can account for why a child is not having easy peer group relationships.
Some children need protection from their peer group because they are teased as a result of being singled out as different. They can come under direct pressure to comply with their peer group as a need to be acceptable. Sometimes due to learning difficulties, they will comply with pressure out of fear, and also as a direct result of feeling no teaching staff understand their difficulties. By nature these children are not badly behaved, they are actually being pressed into this mode of response as a direct result of being pressured to improve their performance when they do not have the skills, knowledge or strategies to do so. Consequently it could be suggested their behaviours are a direct result of the way they are being handled in school it, and until the child has been handled in manner that reflects their learning difficulties their behaviour will continue to spiral down.
If you think something of this is making sense for you, click on Parents, Children+ Schools or follow this up with a call to Learning Insights or click on CONTACT US.