Where Do They Learn It? Some Thoughts on Bullying

This past Monday (Oct. 1st), there was an interesting item in The Boston Globe entitled "Bullying Common On Children's Shows," regarding a recent study of children's television programs by Indiana University researchers.  The study, which was published in the September Journal of Communications, reviewed three episodes of each of 50 popular children's television shows and found that some form of aggression was portrayed on 92% of the programs, "most commonly verbal types such as insulting and teasing, but also nonverbal types such as eye rolling, finger pointing, and ignoring."  The researchers also noted that in most cases the aggressors were portrayed as popular or attractive and were not either punished or rewarded as a result of the behavior.  In other words, it seems that teasing and bullying are frequently shown as normal, expected behavior.  This morning, I read an unrelated article -- a synopsis in the Marshall Memo of a recent article in the Harvard Business Review about the power of social norms to change behavior -- that seems very relevant to this problem.  The HBR article described research demonstrating that simply communicating social norms was amazingly effective in getting people to change their behavior.  For example, in hotel bathrooms a message saying that the majority of people do re-use their towels resulted in a large increase in the number of people re-using their towels, and a message in Britain to citizens in a particular town stating that "over 93% of citizens living in your town pay their tax on time" resulted in an increase in timely collections from 57 to 86 percent.   It seems to me that our children are hearing the message from the media that teasing and bullying is normal, expected behavior and/or that most people speak to others in this manner.

This is a difficult message to counter, as much as parents and teachers work at it, but we clearly need to keep trying.  (Perhaps we also need to push for changes in what is portrayed to children, but that's another topic.)  After reading the HBR article, one thing that occurred to me was to advocate for continual, explicit teaching about consideration for others.  For example, I remember that as a child I was continually hearing messages from my parents regarding consideration for others -- "Don't leave that in the way; someone might trip over it," "Don't take the last brownie; someone else may want it," and the like.  I wonder sometimes if those messages are getting lost in the high-speed pace of life these days.  As I drive into a supermarket parking lot, for example, and find shopping carts left all over rather than being returned, or cars parked in places that make it difficult for others to park, I wonder if children are instead getting the message that thinking only of one's own convenience and not of others is OK.  I think I am going to experiment at school with messages that indicate social norms ("most people avoid saying mean things to others," and the like -- whatever I can find based on facts), and I would encourage all of us to do more explicit teaching of consideration for others, like returning that shopping cart while saying to a child something like, "We need to return this so it's not in other people's way and so others can use it."

It will take all of us to change what we, as a society, are teaching our children, and I do believe that this continual explicit teaching, by our modeling and our language, will be more effective than any anti-bullying assembly or program can possibly be.  I also think we should push for changes in programming for children to more truly portray how most people really do treat each other so that children learn that the norm is politeness and civility, not teasing and bullying.