Power Play: Bullying

This morning I caught a segment on CNN about bullying. There wasn't much I hadn't heard before except a little tidbit on an increase in the number of girls who are doing the bullying.

The author being interviewed (Erik Fisher, "The Bully in Pigtails") posited that bullying was rooted in a power struggle, and as girls were being socialized/raised more these days to be powerful, they were becoming bullies more than they had before.

I worry that this can be twisted into an argument against parity. He didn't go there, but it's not that far of a leap for someone to say, "Well, the answer is to go back to raising our girls to be Little Miss Pretty Pants." Which means skirts.

Power as a factor in bullying -- and in shame that prevents kids from admitting that they are being bullied -- is likely part of the equation. But this seems too linear, and too critical of "power."

Kids should be raised to feel like they have something to contribute, that they have leadership qualities to exercise. The key is teaching them servant leadership: Good leaders equip and empower others.

So maybe it's not so much "power" but "strength." Socializing any boy or girl to feel confident that he or she could influence another person is not bad, as long as the pride and goals are rooted in something positive and beneficial to all involved.

Child bullies often are suffering from someone else putting them down and continually draining them of their positive power. The old paradigm held that bullies often came from "bad" homes or families, broken in some social or economic way. But nowadays bullies come from all classes and backgrounds.

Somehow the kid bully from the "good family" seems even more heinous. Like she should know better, or be more generous with her resources, or have two parents who would notice the behavior and rectify it.

My newly developed theory, fresh off the griddle only this morning, is that maybe some of these bullies are yet another unfortunate consequence from helicopter or hover parenting.

Parents who spend so much of their energy fretting over every detail of their child's life are probably worn out by the time the kid hits adolescence. In desperation to reclaim some of their own adulthood, they may put their kids on autopilot and essentially stop paying any attention to them.

Adolescents are horrible creatures, but that's the time they need a parent's best time and energy. It's never going to go well for the parent and no one gets medals for it. But parental effort at this stage makes the difference between a tolerable kid and an asshole kid. And perhaps a bully kid.

A child who goes from being the center of a parent's world to being virtually ignored doesn't have the emotional toolbox to fix that herself. She is going to take that out on her peers, manifested in as unbalanced a power structure as her parents had established with her from her first toddling days.

Those are my thoughts on the matter this morning, anyway. And if you don't like it ... no, you won't get a knuckle sandwich from me. My parents had at least one eye on me during my adolescence.