The Bullying Starts Here
The bullying started with the bigger kid telling him to shut up. Or asking him if he was changing his diapers when the boy was tying his shoes. Then it escalated to scratching--and hitting.
This wasn’t middle school, or even one of the higher primary grades. These were little kids, second-graders at an Irvine elementary school.
“I didn’t go to school ‘cause he wasn’t being nice,” the picked-on boy said. “He hurt my feelings.”
While eruptions of school violence and their soul-searching aftermath at places such as Columbine High School may have focused attention on bullying among teenagers, some researchers and teachers are now saying it’s never too early to try to nip the problem in the bud.
To be sure, anti-bullying research and curriculum are not new. But in the past, schools have usually focused on fourth-grade students and older. Increasingly, anti-bullying curriculum is being aimed at small schoolchildren, starting as early as kindergarten.
“Bullying tends to increase during elementary school and it peaks approximately during seventh and eighth grade,” said Nancy Mullin-Rindler, associate director of the Project on Teasing and Bullying at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass. “What it means is that our approach to kindergarten has to be more preventive.”
The Wellesley project has produced a curriculum program for use in kindergarten through third grade called “Quit It” that has flown off the shelves in the year and a half since it’s been out. The program is a series of lessons that include teacher-led discussions and writing exercises on such topics as defining bullying and teasing, on what makes children feel “welcome” or “unwelcome,” and what constitutes “courage.”
“I believe a heightened interest has come because of Columbine,” said Lynette Henley, a Vallejo second-grade teacher who teaches “Quit It” and other anti-bullying curricula to teachers around the country. “The whole teacher family wants to find a way to make sure schools are safe.”
The Los Angeles Unified School District for years has had a variety of programs for all its grade levels. And private schools are paying attention too.
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Bullying “is going on more with adolescents, but you need to lay a foundation down somewhere,” said Ray Michaud, schoolmaster at John Thomas Dye, a Bel-Air private school. Michaud invited Wellesley researchers to give a presentation at his school after hearing about “Quit It.” “They don’t just come up with it in fourth grade; it builds over time.”
It didn’t build to physical contact for a 10-year-old Tustin girl, but being bullied was emotionally painful nonetheless.
At the end of third grade, the girl said, a popular girl began intimidating a group of girls into following her orders on the playground. If one in the group disagreed about what game the group would play, for instance, the popular girl would exclude her and try to turn the other girls against her.
“If she teased me in front of everybody, I felt embarrassed,” said the girl. “If she teased me alone I felt sad.” (Like other targets of bullies and their parents, she asked for anonymity to protect herself from further embarrassment at school.)
“They were all scared of her because she had all this power,” remembers the girl’s mother. “She basically controlled the group to the point they hated going to school.”
The Irvine School District is starting to implement training for students and teachers ranging from kindergarten through sixth grade.
“It’s heartbreaking the things that they will say to each other,” said Debra Green, a mother at Brywood School in Irvine who developed a program for fifth- and sixth-graders called “Manners Matter.”
Although cataclysmic events such as the Columbine murders have forced a national discussion about bullying, it turns out that European educators have been combating the problem for 25 years.
“We are now beginning to catch up,” said Susan Limber, director of the Center of Youth Participation and Human Rights at Clemson University’s Institute on Family and Neighborhood Life. “I think that we have learned based on some international work that bullying can and does begin very early.”
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Some researchers believe that bullying is the underlying behavior in a variety of aggressive social interactions between children of all ages. In lower grades, exclusion--particularly by girls who persuade friends not to talk to a particular peer (as in the case of the Tustin 10-year-old) is frequently the manifestation of bullying.
At Wellesley, the idea to look at bullying among very young schoolchildren grew out of work done on teenage sexual harassment by its Center for Research on Women, said Nan Stein, the center’s senior research scientist. It’s part of a continuum of bad behavior that graduates in severity as children graduate to higher grades. For example, pushing and hitting in kindergarten can become verbal assaults--such as racial and sexual epithets--in middle school, and sexual harassment--such as inappropriate touching--in high school, Stein said.
“It’s an interesting phenomenon,” said a Santa Monica mother whose 6-year-old son was bullied in preschool three years ago. “He would come home and say, ‘Nobody likes me, I don’t have any friends.’ You could see it--I wouldn’t call it a depression but it was like his confidence was taking a slam. It was awful.”
The experience was especially painful because her son liked the bully, who responded by saying, “We don’t like you. You can’t play with us. Go away.”
“Left to their own devices,” said the mother, “they’re pretty much like ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ”
