The gymnasium at Woodside Elementary School was filled with concerned parents Nov. 12 who wanted to learn how to protect their children from bullies. Ken Wong, violence intervention specialist for Youth Eastside Services (YES), was there to help.
Brittney Bolin, who has a 7-year-old daughter, attended the presentation to find out what she could do to help.
“There’s issues of bullying throughout the school … I feel my daughter is being bullied with things like pushing, name calling, excluding one person from a group, and taking her things,” Bolin said. “I think this is an important issue, and it affects kids in an emotional way and goes with them as they become adults.”
Jennie Rosich, who believes her 5-year-old son is being called names and harassed at school, can relate.
“I tell him to say thank you, because it takes the wind out of their sails … I remember what it’s like to be bullied in school. Having no friends, being ignored,” Rosich said.
According to Wong, the simple definition of bullying is when someone hurts your body, feelings or things. These things can include teasing, taunting, threatening, hitting, stealing and social isolation. In addition, Wong said the statistics of bullying can be surprising.
• 1 out of 4 kids are bullied
• 1 out of 5 kids admit to being a bully
• 8-10 percent of kids miss one day of class every month due to fear of being bullied
• Only about 4 percent of the time do adults intervene playground bullying
• Bullying happens every seven minutes
“It’s a big problem in schools, and there’s what we see and what we know about,” Wong said. “The affects can be physical and there can be psychological damage. I call it the iceberg effect, where we only see the tip.”
Psychological effects, Wong said, can include depression, anxiety and stress-related illnesses.
“I call it the instamatic flu … I worked with one kid who would get physically ill at the thought of going to school. He would get sick, actually throw up, just at the thought of being around the bully,” Wong said.
In his presentation, Wong offered a few tips that parents can use to help their child if they are being bullied. These include making sure your child possesses assertive skills that allow them to be self confident, never condoning bullying behavior, intervening when the bullying occurs and asking the child’s school to help.
“It’s there, it’s everywhere …it impacts a lot of people,” Wong said. “And it’s our job as adults to protect (the kids).”
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