Violence Isn’t the Answer

I get that most parents are terrified of their kid being bullied and that they want to protect their kids from other kids who are bullying. But violence isn’t the answer.


I would have thought the following didn’t need to be said out loud, but I saw these suggestions on a mom’s discussion board and apparently someone needs to say this.

1) Suggesting your kid learn how to fight to protect themselves from a 6 year old bully is not ok!

2) Suggesting a 6 year old carry pepper spray to respond to a 6 year old bully is even worse! That’s not even something that should be joked about because it’s not a joke – it’s horrifying!

3) Telling your kid to stand up for themselves and then lamenting that your kid is too meek to hit another kid to defend themselves from a bully means, you as a parent are failing!

What’s terrifying to me is that these things have to be said because those suggestions were real. They came from well-educated moms trying to help a fellow mom whose kid is being bullied from a 6 YEAR OLD!! And they were responding as if this 6 year old was an adult violent felon. He’s not. He’s a 6 year old kid.

I get it – most people have no idea how to get bullying to stop, so they get desperate. But how about instead of teaching your kid to use incredibly aggressive and totally not appropriate violent methods to stop a 6 year old from bullying, why not teach them how to disarm bullies using their words instead?

To clarify:

Your kids don’t need to learn how to stop bullying by becoming violent!!!! That isn’t teaching them how to stop a bully. It’s teaching them how to bully the bully back.

What they need to learn is what exactly standing up for yourself actually means. Hint – it’s a verbal technique that involves actual standing. It is about body language. It doesn’t require fighting. Fighting actually makes things worse.

If you have no clue on what standing up to a bully looks like or how to teach your kid to do this – please get my book and avail yourself of the free material on this website.

Learn this material so you can teach it to your kid. And then please share this information so that the insanity of parents bthinking that using pepper spray to deal with a 6 year old bully will stop.