Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Dr. Greg Moody:

Now, who does bully? Again, common myth, kids who bully are outcasts or loners. They have bad social skills, bad self-esteem. That’s a myth. In reality, they’re very rarely socially isolated. They very rarely have low self-esteem. They usually in fact have peers that support them. Often they’re the popular kids. So in reality, they have better than average social skills.

Dr. Greg Moody:

And I think for most people when I explain this, they think back about the kids who were bullying other kids at school and go, “Gee, those kids were the ones that when something happened, they had a snappy comeback. They had a way to resolve situations if there were problems. They had a way if they were in a verbal altercation. They could come up with something that was the right thing to say at the right time.” So they can think that those kids also probably had better than the average, not necessarily better than average, but average or better than average self-esteem.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Now there’s a special group of kids that we’re going to talk about a little later that this doesn’t apply to. But in general, this is the case of kids who bully. And it really isn’t a single profile. This doesn’t apply to everybody. There’s somewhat of a bell curve around this, but we’re trying to give you some ideas of some categories that you could think about here.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Same thing for kids who … Now to contrast this, kids who get bullied. Generally, the kids who get bullied do have now, again, this is a not a hard and fast rule. They generally tend to be quiet, cautious, and they tend to be sensitive. So that would make some sense because the one who’s bullying would get a reaction.

Dr. Greg Moody:

They often have lower than average self-confidence or self-esteem. They tend to be physically weaker. And they also have a resistance or afraid of getting hurt. There’s fear of getting hurt. There’s another characteristic that we see a lot is they find it easier to associate with adults. So this amounts to kids who bully are generally ones in a lot of cases the teachers like.

Dr. Greg Moody:

They’re ones that other kids associate with. They’re ones that have, as we said before, popular relationships with other peers, with teachers, could be popular with the principal, the administration of the school, or in other environments and organizations with churches and different groups that they’re in. They may be really well liked.

Dr. Greg Moody:

The kid who gets bullied may have trouble making friends. They may not be comfortable reaching out and having a good support group around them. They may not be as big as other kids. Again, none of these things are necessarily true. Sometimes kids who get bullied might also have some developmental issues. So a kid who has a developmental issue and knows he or she might be not as successful in an activity, of course they may be a little more cautious about joining in an activity or joining in with friends.

Dr. Greg Moody:

So a kid who gets bullied, you can see them as sort of flip sides or mirror images of each other in a few different ways. Anything to add there, Master Sanborn?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

No, sir. This was stuff that I pretty much understood pretty well.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Okay. Now there’s a special case of this that’s a little bit of a combination of these two, and it’s called the bully victims. Now these guys, they do both. They get bullied and they bully. So they do both. They are bullying other kids on a regular basis and they bully others.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Now, this is about 6% of the population of kids. So we had about 14% of kids get bullied, about 19% of kids bully other kids in the previous example. In this case about 6%, now that’s added into that total, so it’s not an additional 6%. But 6%, so six out of a hundred kids are these bully victims. And these kids kind of have the worst situation from both.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Often they’re actively disliked by both kids and adults. The teachers often don’t like these kids because they’re always having to deal with them. They’re hassling other kids and they’re complaining about getting hassled by other kids. They’re getting bullied and being bullies to other kids. They’re often having developmental issues potentially.

Dr. Greg Moody:

As I mentioned before, they may try to bully weaker students because they’re ones that they know they can pick on. But then the other kids, because they’re not well liked are going to pick on them. And then the other kids in the group like to see them getting picked on because again, they’re not well liked.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Now these kids, they have really poor outcomes from other kids. So if you imagine all the negative things that we talked about that can happen to the kids who are bullied like higher levels of depression, higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of headaches, higher levels of physical issues and all the other issues that happen to kids who bully, they might have higher levels of convictions in felonies, which is the worst one to me.

Dr. Greg Moody:

But also they have poor academic grades, negative climates at school, tend to be more truant and tend to have higher levels of absenteeism and all those things. If you add all those up, you can imagine that this is a major problem for these kids in a lot of different ways. So bully victims kind of have both the worst situation from everybody, but also they’re the worst liked of everybody in all these scenarios.

Dr. Greg Moody:

So let’s move on to what the other kids in the environment want to do. Most kids around want to do something. Why isn’t bullying taken care of by teachers and why isn’t bullying also kind of self-regulated by the other kids? Why don’t the other kids do anything? Do other kids not care or do other kids actively … Are they actively uninterested in what’s happening when a kid gets bullied? Are they interested? Do they want to help? What’s going on with that?

Dr. Greg Moody:

So let’s talk about that a little bit. What about the other kids? And what we find is most kids want to do something, but why aren’t they doing anything? So here, let me give you some stats on this. 38% of kids figure it’s none of their business. So these kids, about a third of the kids, don’t really think they should do anything. It’s none of their business. They should leave well enough alone and they don’t want to get involved.

Dr. Greg Moody:

About another third, about 27% think they should help, but they don’t. Now why don’t they? We’ll talk about that in a little bit. And about another third of the kids, about 35% try to help. So if we look at this data, what we know from this data is that you can roughly think about this as about a third, a third, and a third.

Dr. Greg Moody:

About a third kind of ambivalent, it’s none their business. About a third think they should help, but don’t. And about a third do try to help. But that means the majority of them, if you add these two up, 27% and 35%, that adds up to 62%, if I’m doing my math right. 62% of kids do think they should do something about it. 62% of the kids don’t like bullying. They don’t like the bullying to happen, but they’re not doing anything about it.

Dr. Greg Moody:

So why aren’t they? Why aren’t other kids doing something about what they think is a problem? Now this, by the way, applies to adults. Everything we do in this module and when we’re talking about these things would apply to adults too. They generally think they should do something, but they don’t. Why not?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Don’t know what to do.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, they don’t. Well, they don’t know what to do, or maybe there are some other reasons. So let’s talk about those. So, why don’t they help? Or why don’t they think it’s effective? So, some of the kids that helped will talk about that. So, here’s some interesting data. 66% of the kids felt that the staff, the other people around them … And again, by the way, adult data is very similar to this … responded poorly.

Dr. Greg Moody:

So if you were a kid and you helped, but you felt that two-third of the staff responded poorly, whatever they did, they might have blamed you for the problem, blamed the kid who got bullied for the problem. They might have not done anything about it. They may have ignored you. They may have yelled at you for bringing the problem to their attention, whatever the problem was. And again, we’re not blaming teachers for this. They often aren’t educated.

Dr. Greg Moody:

As we talked about in the other modules, they aren’t told how to identify the difference between conflict and bullying. They’re two different things and they don’t necessarily know which tools to use in those cases. Only 6% of the kids interviewed thought that the staff responded well. So imagine that. 66% of the kids thought the staff responded poorly, only 6% thought the staff responded well, and then the difference was just an in between. So that’s one reason.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Here are some other information. In another study, this was a middle school kids. This was of elementary kids, the first one. In a middle school study, they asked some ninth grade students whether or not they thought the teachers were interested in helping. So this one, the first one I just mentioned was whether or not they responded well. The second is, do you think the kids were interested in helping?

Dr. Greg Moody:

And this is what the kids said. The kids said that 35% thought the teachers were interested. They only thought 25% of the administration, the principals and the school administrators were interested in helping. 44% didn’t know. And 21% thought they were not interested. So that means about 65% of the students didn’t think or didn’t know whether or not the teachers were interested in helping.

Dr. Greg Moody:

So, think about these two statistics that we just talked about. In one case, the kids about 62% of the time in our other discussion, the kids wanted to help. They either didn’t do it or they did, but they wanted to help in either scenario, 62%, about two-thirds. And in this case, we asked, why don’t they help? About two-thirds of the time, they’re either not sure or they’re pretty sure the teachers may not be very responsive.

Dr. Greg Moody:

What this means is a lot of times, the kids are helping even in spite of whether or not the teachers are supporting them. And in fact, more often than not, the kids are helping when the teachers or the administration may not be supportive of them. So the conclusion that we would come to here is the kids are doing their job.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Remember, let me be clear about this. 62% want to help. What do we just say there? 65% don’t know if they’re having support. Those are the opposite numbers. This means the teachers may not help them. This is the kids who want help or want to help stop the bullying, and the 65% means that they don’t know if the teachers will help them.

Dr. Greg Moody:

These are the opposite statistics. These are not matching, even though the numbers are very close. So if we understand this, that means if it was 50-50, then it would mean that the kids, about half the time, want to help. And the teacher, about half the time, want to support them. Maybe that matched up and maybe the kids want to help when they get support from the teachers.

Dr. Greg Moody:

But this is not the case. This means that very much of the time the kids want to help. If the kids wanted to help a hundred percent of the time and the teachers were zero, that means the kids get zero support from the teachers. This means a lot of the cases, the kids get very little support from the teachers, about twice as much as they would as only about … That means only about 35% of the time they get support. That would be the equivalent statistic about how much they get support.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Does that make sense? So 62% of the time they want to help. About 35% of the time they get support. And even then, that’s not going to be a one-to-one correspondence. So, no wonder it’s a difficult situation in schools. Did you have anything to add, Master Sanborn?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

So by support, kids are looking for any type of positive response to them helping?

Dr. Greg Moody:

Well, they may not. What it means is the kids aren’t expecting support from their teachers or their administrators probably.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Right, but they’re looking for that? They would know what to do if they thought they were going to get help?

Dr. Greg Moody:

We don’t know if they’re looking for that or not. What we know is that they’re not expecting it. They don’t think that it’s available. They don’t think that there is any support available. So that’s what this means is that these are not correlated. If it was 62% of kids want to help and they all thought the teachers and administration were supporting, why wouldn’t they think that?

Dr. Greg Moody:

Well, that’s because they’re not being told that the administration and teachers want to support them and/or when bullying happens, they don’t see any evidence that they’re getting support or help from the teachers or administrators. Or if they’re bullying other kids themselves, which 19% of them do, then they’re not getting stopped.

Dr. Greg Moody:

So if I’m bullying another kid and I don’t get stopped, then I know it’s okay to do. And in fact, I get benefits from that because I get more popular at school. I get higher status. Because you get higher status if you bully another child and nothing happens to you, I’m in a higher power position.

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