Can You Bully Proof Your Child?

At the Greater Good website, there's an insightful review of a couple books addressing bullying and ways to prevent it.  What I like most about the ideas in this piece is that they have a preemptive flavor, to undermine bullying--including cyber-bullying--before it begins eliciting reactive behaviors. From the piece:

Bullying continues to be a real problem in schools across the United States, garnering a lot of media attention. But bullying occurs outside of the classroom too, beyond the supervision of adults, particularly through online social media, like Facebook, where kids often post comments and pictures in the blink of an eye, without considering the consequences.

According to James Steyer, the founder of Common Sense Media and a professor at Stanford Univeristy, parents can and should do more to protect kids from this kind of cyber-bullying. He believes that cyber-bullying has become rampant in part because parents are unsure themselves of what constitutes a valid and acceptable use of technology.

In fact, many parents are less savvy about using the internet than their kids, making it hard for them to keep up with the ever-changing array of options for online connections and creating a situation where supervision can prove difficult.

Read the entire piece at Greater Good.  

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