How to Talk to your Child about Bullying -- Apologize!

How Do We Talk to our Child about Bullying?:

Start With an Apology from your Parent(s)

By Reginald Leamon Robinson

I just read a blog article entitled, DO and DON’T: How to Talk to your Child about Bullying, in the Huffingtonpost.com (October 8, 2013).  As I’ve felt in the past, I was left feeling like the authors of such articles still can’t get down to the source of the bullying.

Ever since I saw the stop bullying campaign on television, particularly on HBO, I always wondered if this feel-good approach would really help children who are either doing the bullying or suffering from it.  Well, I just read all 11 panels on this site, and I can tell that based on my ongoing research, children are not born to bully or to suffer bullying.  Rather, it is parents who create such experiences for their children by engaging in a parenting style, which is principally learned through how they were raised, that Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good would call “poisonous pedagogy.”  Based on power plays and the need of an adult child parent to victimize their children, in effect killing in their children today what was killed in them when they were children, parents who create bullying experiences for their children, regardless of whether they are doing to others or attracting it to them, require obedient children as a very high value.  It doesn’t matter if these parents are liberals, moderates, conservatives.  Parents who embrace poison pedagogy do violence to their children’s vitality, spontaneity, and authenticity by breaking their children’s will.  In addition to good, respectful, and obedient children, such parents want orderly, cleanliness, and emotionally controlled children.  You’ll know when you’re around such parents or adults if you take your children into public spaces, and your children in moments of joy and happiness will squeal or shriek.  Often as that child's parent, you’ll get that look that says control your child.  As a parent, and a single dad, I’ve received such looks and glares when they heard my child’s voice.

Anyway, my point is that we keep focusing on how to talk to our children if they suffer bullying.  We might ask: what can I do to help Mary and Paul not have these emotionally and physically painful experiences, in which they pretty much get to relive the powerlessness that they’ve suffered through at home for at less 7 or 8 years or more at home?

Home is where we as parents create those children who will bully and those who will suffer the impotent fury and discharged anger of a child who has been maltreated in the earliest years of his or her life.  By impotent fury, Alice Miller meant that we will recreate the traumatizing experiences when we’re bigger, stronger, or more powerful than the person or persons who are the target of that fury. Just consider that most of the elected officials in the House of Representatives (and the Senate) come from homes in which their parents shoved rules, law, order, obedience, and power dynamics down the throats of elected officials like Speaker of the House Boehner, and now that he’s in a position of public power, he’d rather shove his power, rules, order, and values down the throats of public citizens, revealing that not only he does not care about the average citizen, but he also intends to bully others who he perceives as less powerful.  He won’t surrender, for that means certain existential death.  At the same time, adult children like Boehner who still suffer from their internalized maltreatment and children who bully at school or elsewhere are discharging the anger that has built up within their psychological, physical, and emotional bodies.  I can imagine that they are always ready to bully, to fight, by always seeking out other children who they perceive as smaller and weaker.  Every time they bully someone, they release a bit more of their internalized anger.  Speaker of the House Boehner and other elected officials, who forced our federal government to shutdown because they couldn’t defeat the Affordable Care Act at the November ballot box and in the federal courts and before the Supreme Court, now wish to de-fund the Act so that they can serve their new masters -- special interests, which means that ironically they have exchanged their parental abusers for corporate masters who treated such officials as little more than hired guns or expendable objects.

So if we wish really to end bullying, we must begin to address the issue by first and foremost faulting the parents and caregivers who create these bullying children in the first place.  So based on Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good at page 59, consider the following.  It’s how parents create bullies to torment the very children who have been broken at home before they get to school or other public places.

1.  Adults are the masters of the dependent child.

2.  Adults determine in a godlike fashion what is right and wrong.

3.  The child is held responsible for the anger of adults.

4.  Parents must always be shielded.

5.  The child’s life-affirming feeling pose a threat to the autocratic parent.

6.  The child’s will must be “broken” as soon as possible.

7.  All this must happen at a very early age so the child “won’t notice” and will not be able to expose the adults.

At the very least, informational programs on bullying, including this blog article on How to Talk to your Child about Bullying, has shielded parents from any accusation that they created (or co-created with the proxy abuse of the other caregiver) the bully who torments our already maltreated children.  And how do such parents achieve the 7 steps of poisonous pedagogy?  They must at the very least engage in physical, emotional, or psychological violence.  If such violence begins when the child is between 0 and 3 years of age, she’ll respond with freezing (one of the four responses to trauma, viz., fight, flight, freeze, fawn), and to freeze is to dissociate, which is the primary response of the infant child.  And she’ll “forget” what actually happened.  Unfortunately, this dissociation does not kill the repressed anger.  It’s been stored in the child’s body, and at some point, unless that child gets real, non-humiliating, and non-manipulative love from someone, including siblings and extended family, that child will unconsciously act on her anger and fury.  In our context, one result is school or public bullying, which can be traced inevitably back to that child’s earliest, and perhaps in the worse case ongoing, experience with childhood trauma.

So, to the implied question of how do we speak to our child or children about bullying, I’d say that parents should begin by apologizing to their children for having slowly or violently broken their children’s will, thus contributing to their need to re-experience unconsciously either power and control over someone who is smaller or weaker than him or her, or to relive the painful suffering and humiliation that flow inexorably from poisonous pedagogy at the hand of their parents.

With a sincere apology offered to the child who has suffered the humiliation of bullying, parent(s) can begin to have an ongoing dialogue with their children, in which at the very least parents don’t attempt to regain the powerful high ground by lying, by faulting the child’s innocent developmentally appropriate behavior, or by shutting down the child’s natural anger and rage when she realizes that the first bullying experience she ever suffered and had to accept as love came from her mother, father, or both.

With an honest, sincere dialogue between the parent and child, perhaps the family begins to heal.  At the very least, the child begins to heal and has the potential for a different relationship with her parent.  And healing would naturally require the bullying parent to accept that he was maltreated when he was an infant or toddler or child.  In addition, that parent must begin to fault his parent(s), and this process according to Alice Miller does not mean that the adult child has to hate his parents.  However, it also doesn’t mean that they will become engaged in a path-breaking dialogue either.  Chances are great that the adult child who confronts his parents will meet with “How dare you? Don’t you know what sacrifices we made for you, so that you could live well, go to the best school, and enjoy leisure?”

Unfortunately, based on the intergenerational transmission of violence, such amenities can’t replace real love, compassionate tenderness, and non-violent parenting toward the adult child.

While it’s not a magic bullet, an adult parent’s sincere apology to their bullied child and an honest sharing of some of what the parent did to the suffering child will re-create a neutral, humanity-recognizing space in the parent-child relationship, in which real healing for both the parent and the child can take place.  That child can gradually reclaim her vitality, spontaneity, and authenticity, the very source on which her self-esteem must rest.

With such self-esteem, she’ll not need unconsciously to relive her shame and humiliation by drawing to her confirmatory bullying experiences that “say” she’s unworthy.