What Does Your School Do to Prevent Bullying?

[Note: This post draws from a scholarly paper I wrote with a colleague summarizing what does and doesn’t work in bullying prevention. Full disclosure: I work with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, which implements and researches the social and emotional learning approach called RULER.]

If you’re the parent of a school-age child, or an educator, it’s hard to miss that October is Bullying Prevention Month. And while a campaign to raise awareness can sometimes feel contrived, it does present an opportunity to learn more. So if you’re not sure what your school’s approach is to bullying (or other mean or aggressive behaviors, for that matter), this month’s campaign is an invitation to find out.

Here are a few ideas that will be helpful to be aware of before you have that conversation.

First, it’s worth knowing that every school is required by state law to have some kind of bullying prevention policy. There are websites listing your state’s regulations on bullying, cyberbullying, sexting, and even revenge porn. Many states also identify the purview of the school’s responsibility—for example whether a school is responsible for a cyberbullying incident that happens off-campus. (In many cases, they are, if the incident spills over to create an unsafe or hostile learning environment.) The laws do not intend, though, that bullying should be dealt with through the legal system, which would be inappropriate for children; rather, the laws are there to hold schools accountable for what happens in their environment.

When you ask your child’s teacher, division head, or head of school what their approach is to preventing bullying, there should be three parts to their answer: how they address true prevention, intervention, and evaluation.

First, schools should be able to define bullying (aggression that is repeated and involves a power imbalance) and describe their plan for preventing it from popping up in the first place. True prevention would cultivate the behaviors, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that would make bullying less likely to happen—which, of course, is effortful and complicated to do.

Traditional approaches have focused simply on raising awareness, making new rules about bullying, monitoring “hot spots” better (like hallways and bathrooms), and administering stiffer consequences. But that approach does not consistently work. National data shows that bullying rates have flatlined in the last decade; worse, there’s been a slight uptick in all forms of bullying in the last three years. Students consistently report that teachers don’t see most of the bullying that happens (bullies are skilled at hiding below the radar) and that many educators don't actually help students in need when asked.

 The specific kind of prevention matters.

Many programs are trendy but lack any rigorous evaluation of their efficacy:

·      Programs that rely solely on punishment and zero tolerance aren’t healthy or successful, and they disproportionately target students of color.

·      Programs that place sole responsibility on the students for working out the conflict (like peer mediation) can be contraindicated and may actually increase bullying and aggression.

·      A peer conflict-resolution approach can be useful under certain conditions, as when the students are of equal social power, positive skills are taught proactively, and the adult facilitators are skilled in conflict resolution. But a bully by definition always has more power, and placing the target and the tormentor in the same room can be clinically unethical. (Adult victims of abuse are never asked to “work it out” with their abuser.) Additionally, children have extra legal protections because of their developmental status.

·      Programs that rely solely on bystanders to intervene also have mixed results. Bystander intervention has been successful in some homogenous societies like Finland, and it can be effective when students are empowered to make positive changes in the norms of the school culture. But as for intervening in an active bullying situation, it’s not always safe, not all students can do it, and it deflects responsibility from the adults who have convened the school environment.

What does work to prevent bullying?

Data consistently show that creating a positive school climate and teaching specific skills of emotional and social intelligence are the two best bets for reducing all kinds of hostilities, including bullying, mean behaviors, micro-aggressions, conflicts, and aggression. This makes sense. After all, just because you’ve punished the behaviors you don’t want doesn’t mean that you’ll create the behavior you do want. To create appropriate behavior, you have to proactively guide children, scaffolding the desired skills in age-appropriate steps. In other words, if you want to turn a ship around, you first have to know where you’re going, and then you have to give everyone the sailing skills to get there.

The research on social and emotional learning (SEL) shows that when an evidence-based approach is implemented correctly, it improves classroom relationships and prosocial behavior among the students and teachers—and it simultaneously reduces conflicts, aggression, bullying, and even hostile attribution bias (the tendency to believe that others have mean intentions). For example, a study of 36 first-grade teachers showed that developing SEL skills was more effective at reducing aggression and improving self-regulation than traditional classroom management techniques.

Children from preschool to high school have typical emotional and social challenges that play out in, and even dominate, the school day. They need constructive skills to learn how to:

·      change friendships (which spikes in mid-elementary school and again in adolescence), without prompting accusations of exclusions

 ·      resolve peer conflicts without ganging up or resorting to power-assertion

 ·      manage their own difficult feelings constructively

 ·      foster feelings of inclusion

 ·      manage feeling vulnerable and support others in a vulnerable exposure

 ·      express their sense of agency and assertiveness appropriately

·      allow others to shine without feeling diminished

 ·      maintain close friendships inside and outside of school and balance closer friendships within a wider circle of peer acquaintances

 ·      express their needs constructively

 ·      care for all students

 ·      spot—and counter—the hegemony of the outside world inside the school environment

 ·      foster empathy for others without giving themselves away

 ·      manage the volatility of feelings of sexual attraction

 ·      know the difference between having fun and harmful teasing

Some people will judge this kind of educational focus as inappropriate for schools. But research shows that emotional and social skills are predictors of success. Schools report increases in academic engagement and decreases in aggression; organizations that track employment success recommend social and emotional skills more and more; and the teaching of social and emotional skills has been demonstrated to be cost-effective.

The second part of an educator’s response to your query should describe the action (intervention) that a school plans to take once bullying happens. Educators need to respond swiftly and skillfully, without avoiding or minimizing. This requires a lot of discernment.

Sometimes parents may not have all the information about a situation. Sometimes it takes time and gentle investigating to elicit the full story from the children involved. Sometimes it’s not actually bullying (i.e., repeated aggression involving an imbalance of power) but simply hurt feelings, a distinction that leads to different kinds of interventions. But if true bullying is happening, everyone needs to step up quickly to end the day-after-day abuse and suffering of the bullied child. And while there isn’t one prescriptive silver bullet, educators should have a plan that draws on the culture and skills they have been cultivating in the school environment for healthy and swift problem-solving.

And finally, the third part of an educator’s response to your query should address exactly how they’ll know if their approach is working. How will they assess whether bullying and other unwanted behaviors are decreasing? A red flag should go up if educators rely on parent surveys. The data should come from the children themselves, for example in regular school climate surveys.

Parents have an important role to play:.

·      Harsh parenting is associated with bullying and victimization. Authoritative parenting—a style that combines warmth and support with limits and structure—has been repeatedly shown to lead to better school engagement, stronger prosocial skills, and emotional wellbeing in children.

·      Sibling and family dynamics that are respectful, where children’s agency, assertiveness, and negotiating skills are cultivated and where consent is a value, lead to better outcomes for children.

·      Parents can support their children’s friendships by making home a welcoming place for their children’s friends. Parents should encourage their children to have multiple friendship groups, not only in school but in their extended family, neighborhood, and/or larger community.

·      It’s also useful for parents to network with each other. Establishing open lines of communication can help everyone stay on the same page and may head off trouble in the early stages.

Bullying is a complicated issue, but it’s also not a mystery. At this point, we have plenty of research showing us what works and what doesn’t—not only to reduce and prevent bullying but to create positive home, school, and community environments that give our children the social and emotional skills they need to succeed. Once you find out which approach your child’s school is using, you may want to take an active role in guiding and supporting the implementation of the best evidence-based approaches.

What Does a Developmental Psychologist See in a 40th Class Reunion?

When I told people I was going to my 40th high school reunion, I might as well have said I was jumping off a cliff. Almost across the board, the reaction was shock, though the reasons varied. Granted, I hadn’t been in touch with my classmates, so some degree of surprise was legitimate. But my friends and family also projected their own reasons: high school had been the “worst time of their lives”; that they had never “fit in”; they didn’t want to open their present lives to judgment. But I’m a developmental psychologist, and I wanted to understand what a reunion ritual might mean. Nothing is more interesting to me than discovering how children grow up and their lives turn out.

As the date approached, I finally became apprehensive myself. Most of us had been together since kindergarten, but what if I didn’t recognize people after forty years? After all, I now have silver hair and 40 additional pounds; others would also have changed. Or what if we didn’t have anything to talk about? How would I react to an old “flame,” or he to me? Could I finally uncover the story behind a friend who had so traumatically “dropped” me in sixth grade? When nervous jokes started showing up on the Facebook reunion page, I saw that I wasn’t the only one with anxiety. I recruited a childhood friend to go with me.

“I’m only doing this for you, you know,” Vic joked when she greeted me at my hotel. Our mothers went to high school together and been friends long before we were born. Vic remembers the fuzzy socks I wore in second grade and how my father had carried me into school in his arms when my broken leg was in a cast. I remember making vinegar and baking soda volcanoes at Vic’s house and singing soprano next to her in choir.

We arrived at the Curling Club (home to the winter sport of sliding granite stones on ice) to a frenzy of slightly boozed-up greetings. About a third of my class of 140 was there. A current of excitement crackled through the crowd—hails from across the lawn; flying wisecracks and boisterous teasing; and enthusiastic, if somewhat self-conscious, hugging. It was a relief to find my old friend Dave, who was just as unruffled as I’d remembered him—a straight shooter, unperturbed by his surroundings. He had worked for a time for my father, a milkman; his mother had been my beloved third grade teacher. I was happy to meet Dave’s wife, and a meaningful conversation ensued about parents, illness, children, and more.

Sociologist Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi has observed that high school reunions can trigger a sudden threat to one’s identity. In the space of a short gathering, we are called upon to reconcile past expectations with our present reality, among people who shared that past. At my reunion, the actual list of predictions that our peers had made about each other 40 years ago hid amidst the memorabilia. “Diana will run a computer dating service,” it read, and the old memory of craving connection amidst my chaotic environment flashed. Other predictions were equally unpredictive: that a high school romance would end in marriage (it didn’t) or that a career would peak in a grocery store stockroom (it didn’t); and predictions for women centered on marriage and children. Predictions can be entertaining, but since these weren’t about activating our best future selves, I regretted their presence. Reunions are not just happy gatherings, Vinitzky-Seroussi writes. They “telescope the life course” and create pressure to evaluate, or protect, or project our choices, often in the space of a very short, catch-up conversation.

But this was not our tenth or even twenty-fifth reunion, the early ones that Vinitzky-Seroussi studied. This was our fortieth, a time when life achievements are behind for most of us and some are even looking toward retirement. Fortunately, I felt well-anchored in the present, and I think others did, too.

The conventional wisdom about reunions is that people can surprise you, and I found that to be true. Who would have known that the quiet boy in the back of the band would be a pillar of the community as the trusted funeral director? Or that the guy who seemed lost in high school would be so crisp and successful at 58? Psychologists use the terms “equifinality” and “multifinality” to describe how very different paths can lead to similar outcomes, or, conversely, how similar paths can lead to very different outcomes. At the same time, our perceptions of what’s important changes, too: The kids who once dominated in popularity might now appear boring and superficial, and the former “outsiders” often turn out to be the really interesting ones. And yet when I asked Vic if she recognized everyone, she replied, “Not so much from their faces, but their energy—it’s the same.”

Even though we all shared a large part of our pasts, we couldn’t have truly known each others’ lives while we were children. A few kids had seemed to sail through with equanimity—they ran the student council at school and collected maple syrup at home–but even then, there were hints of malaise. I knew that it wasn’t right that the gentle, deer-like boy who sat in front of me in seventh grade homeroom smelled like alcohol and cigarettes. Another child was rumored to have been abused, though there was no action taken to protect her. I was a high achiever but suffered with parents who were in constant conflict; they struggled with mental health and substance use issues. Many parents were alcoholics before the disease was even named.

Psychologists now know that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are predictive of later physical and mental health problems, including heart disease, depression, and suicidality.  Research suggests that about a third of kids are lucky enough to escape trauma, but about a quarter suffer such high doses that it affects brain development, immune and endocrine functioning, and can create mental and physical disease systems that reduce the lifespan by an average of 20 years. How different might many students’ lives have been if an adult had recognized their feelings and had the skill to approach them and say, “You look down. What’s going on, and can I help?” Today, innovative schools throughout the country are feathering emotional skill development into their academic curricula, and studies show that both individual kids, and the school as a whole do better. Pediatricians, too, are beginning to screen for ACEs and offer early intervention services to families and children at risk.

Childhood is not easy, even at the best of times, and middle school is an especially stressful period. Conventional wisdom used to hold that it was the changing sex hormones that made kids “crazy,” but scientists now understand that puberty kicks off changes in the brain that make youth more emotionally sensitive, more sensitive to their social world, more willing to take risks, and more vulnerable to mental illness and addictions. Combine all of that with changes in schools, new peer groups, or family troubles, and you quickly get a pile-up of stressors that can be overwhelming.

Jockeying for status in peer groups begins as early as the fifth grade, and, in my day, peer dynamics were raw and lacking any guidance. Consistent with the research, it was the male athletes and the conventionally pretty girls (especially cheerleaders) who were conferred high status, and kids who were “different” were often marginalized—through teasing, exclusion, and gossip. Girls who physically matured earlier than average, or boys who matured later than average, were at greater risk, just as they are today. Too tall, too skinny, too heavy, too awkward, too shy, too country, too slow…the “faults” can be endless. 

Kids naturally form and re-form friendships, but without real social skills, the process can be excruciating. In sixth grade, I was shattered when my best friend of six years decided one day to simply stop talking to me. While it’s natural for a child to feel ready to find new friends, this particular friend had had no skills with which to explain her needs. Her silent treatment left a mark, and I used it both as a cautionary tale for my own children and an illustration in the college courses I taught on teen development. Research now shows that humans are such intensely social creatures that social ostracism lights up physical pain pathways in the brain; it can be more damaging than even physical abuse. Sometimes, I imagine how our friendship “breakup” could have gone differently, had we had the social skills kids can learn in school nowadays to navigate peer conflict. Though my well-being is no longer affected by that experience, I was curious to know my former friend’s side of the story. Yet when we greeted each other at the reunion, we didn’t get much beyond a hello. I took that to mean that it was not likely to be the place—or perhaps the person—where such a conversation could happen.

“Humans are storytelling, story-loving creatures,” says psychologist Matthew Lieberman, author of Social Brain, Social Mind. One of the most powerful ways we understand the experience of being human is by constructing a narrative of our lives. Young children begin this process as soon as they learn the word “I,” and parents begin telling them stories about when they were little. And at the other end of lifespan, elders engage in a “life review,” telling and retelling their stories to help them make sense of their lives.

Reunions—where our past selves meet our present selves—can be a special opportunity to re-weave our stories. I observed it happening all evening. One woman who had seemed defiant and tough in junior high apologized to the PE teacher, telling her that she hadn’t meant to be the teacher’s “nemesis” but in fact was a military kid who got moved around a lot.

“I never knew that,” the teacher breathed, empathically.

A man who had been a geek before geeks were cool enthusiastically shared that he was an inventor, held patents, had designed a part of the space shuttle and a medical device, and had made millions doing so.

A friend divulged her confusion about some same-sex experimentation that had gone on at a childhood sleepover. Of course there had been no framework for normalizing that, or even language to name it.

I, too, had a story to revise. When a popular biology teacher’s name came up, I shared that six years after we’d graduated, he had prevented my Lutheran church from marrying me and my husband, because my husband is from India. “He’s not a good guy,” I grumbled about the teacher.

The life stories flowed, from what it’s like for a Minnesotan to be transplanted to the Deep South, to taking care of grandchildren, to being the youngest in a senior citizen woodworking shop, to losing a child. There was a lot of loss and growth to process, as well as joy to celebrate.

One evening is not enough time together to truly span 40 years; it’s just a sliver of reality. But I happily put new numbers and email addresses into my phone. I want to keep up with some old friends, and I discovered new ones that I’d missed earlier.

And that old flame?

“I learned from you,” he told me. “Your family had high expectations, and I craved some of that.”

“You sheltered me at a stormy time,” I replied, remembering his laughter and easy-going manner.

Class reunion? For me, at least, it wasn’t so scary. What we went through together mattered, and bearing witness to one another’s stories—from our shared past and the years that had followed— felt like a good way to honor that.