A huge fear for parents is sending their kids off to school. They can’t be there to protect them from other kids or situations that may hurt them. With bullying being so talked about on the news and media, which it should be, parents are now fearing that their child may be the victim of bullying at school. But what if your child is the bully? That thought is just as scary to parents, or even more so because the damaging effects bullying can have on a child can last a lifetime. So how do you prevent your child from becoming a bully?
In her book Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher and Kid Needs to Know About Ending the Cycle of Fear, author Carrie Goldman draws from the work of several scholars and shares information on parenting practices that can help prevent bullying – as well as those that can actually foster bullying behaviors. Here are a few examples of risk factors and protective factors that Goldman shares in her book:
Risk Factors – Kids who bully others are more likely to experience:
- Frequent and inconsistent punishment
- Harshness, rejection or neglect from their parents
- Cruelty, maltreatment and domestic violence
- Low parental warmth
- Low family connections and cohesion
- Limited parental involvement in school
Protective Factors – Parents of well-adjusted kids tend to:
- Use effective monitoring
- Communicate warmth, love and a sense of belonging
- Get actively involved in their child’s school activities
- Set appropriate, consistent boundaries
- Have expectations for their children
- Communicate regularly with their children’s teachers
California is once again in the spotlight with news that Governor Brown has has signed legislation to allow a child to have three legal parents. The new legislation was created to cover certain situations in which a same-sex couple has a child with an opposite-sex biological parent. Of course, this is causing all sorts of controversy from proponents of the “traditional” family, but with the law set to effect at the beginning of next year, California will now be the fifth state to pass such a law.
The bill was partly prompted by a complicated custody battle in 2011 involving a child of lesbian parents who was placed in foster care after one parent ended up in jail and the other in the hospital. The child’s biological father was initially granted parental responsibilities by a court, but the decision was later reversed after an appeals court concluded a child could not have more than two parents.
The bill was sponsored by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and by the Children’s Advocacy Institute at San Diego School of Law.
Opponents of the new law had the following to say:
“Once we started trying to normalize parenting by same-sex couples and redefine marriage to remove the dual gender requirement, we had to end up with triple parenting,” says Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of the Ruth Institute, which seeks to promote traditional marriage.
Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, says, “This is, in the long run, going to be a mistake.”
He adds, “The ones who are going to pay the price are not the activists, but it’s going to be children, who will see greater conflict and indecision over matters involving their well-being.”
So what do you think? Does this law make sense for certain situations and certain families?
