Parent Time

Gavin is “guarding” the slide at recess. He decides who goes up the ladder and who can’t. Amanda tries to get on. “No stinky people!” he says. Amanda looks crestfallen. Leah steps in: “Gavin. That’s bullying. Stop!” Gavin hesitates, then steps aside sheepishly. Amanda scampers up the ladder.

This is what is supposed to happen when a bystander witnesses bullying in a schoolyard. At least that is what they are trying to teach kids in schools across the country.

But I have to ask: Are we betting too heavily on kids to stop bullying themselves?

Schools pay loads of attention to bullying. Much of the effort goes into raising awareness and teaching children how to handle it, including how to stand up to bullies. What schools don’t spend much time on is devising better ways for adults to reduce bullying. One reason for this is some very solid and well-publicized Canadian research by psychologists Debra Pepler of York University in Toronto and Wendy Craig of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., which revealed that children witness a lot of bullying never seen by adults and that kids sometimes intervene to stop it.

When peers do intervene, Pepler and Craig found, they succeed about half the time in stopping the bully. This oft-repeated finding has meant that educating bystanders has become a major focus of recent anti-bullying programs.

I see the point. But I’ve always been uneasy with the idea that kid interveners are the answer to bullying. And it turns out my uneasiness is well founded.

The findings of a study (Pepler was a co-author) conducted at an Ontario camp last summer are telling. Three-quarters of the kids in the survey said it’s a good strategy to tell a bully to stop, but only 37 percent said they’d actually done that the last time they’d seen a kid being bullied. The study’s conclusion: We have to work even harder to give kids the skills that will help them “stand up to bullies.”

Originally published in Today's Parent, March 2010