What children can do to stop being bullied.

First, have a read of this. Then my response below may start to make sense.

Hello Tayla,

Definitely don’t ignore that kind of behaviour, no.

I was bullied too at school. A lot. To the point that my life was starting to be endangered.

The best advice I can give you is this: “people treat you the way you let them”.

They’re almost always seeing how much you will take, what your own personal limit is. It sounds like you’ve already reached that limit.

Contrary to what most people think, everything in the universe starts at the smallest scales. With time, the the consequences get bigger.

So start by being assertive with small things. Like if someone makes fun of your hair, tell them not to do it because you don’t like it. If they continue, make fun of THEM. Make life difficult for them. See how they like it! The fact is, they won’t like it. And you will of course already know that. This is called “setting boundaries”, and it is something that I only learned about at age 38 (which is way, way too late in life).

I’m certainly not saying that you should provoke others on purpose if they haven’t attacked you already (otherwise you’ve just become a nasty bully yourself). What I am advising is that you should react to their behaviour with an appropriate-level response.

So rather than being so agreeable with everything that people are doing to you, you really need to start to defend yourself.

It doesn’t have to be physical. Indeed, at first, you’ll probably defend yourself verbally.

The best thing to remember is that prevention is better than cure. If you are truly assertive from day one, you won’t even get into a ‘dangerous’ situation, because the bullies will look elsewhere…

THE BEST WAY IS TO START SMALL. YOU DON’T HAVE TO START WITH THE BIGGEST BULLY, BECAUSE BY THAT STAGE YOU WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY BE GETTING YOURSELF INTO A FIGHT (because by now the bully doesn’t want to appear like a coward since they’re ‘committed’ to bullying you — even though we all know full well that they really are cowards, otherwise they would go up to the baddest people and start shit with them instead of you). Bullies always pick on the WEAKEST individuals. Ever notice how the biggest bullies don’t pick on each other?

You should tell the new you that you aren’t going to take this kind of shit anymore. Then don’t.

Eventually you will learn to stand up for yourself because unfortunately no one else can do it for you (not even your mum can be with you all the time).

I suggest you do something before you end up with general anxiety disorder (I have it and I always tend to be very nervous around people now).

Good luck,
Dr. Leslie Dean Brown.