Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Thanks everybody for being here today. I’m Dr. Greg Moody. Today we won’t be joined by Senior Master Sanborn. It’s going to be me today, and we’re going to be talking about something a little bit different than we talked about last time. Last time we talked about school programs and how they impact bullying prevention with kids and some school programs work great. We recommended a list of those in our last topic, part four. This is going to be part five, and we’re going to be talking about what to do if your kid’s being bullied and what you can do, regardless of whether the program at the school is working for you or not. What do you can do in a way that’s after your kid’s been bullied and how to address that.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

We’re also going to be talking a little bit in a future session about what to do proactively so that your kid isn’t going to be bullied and that you can lower the risk of them getting bullied. So today our topic is really after the fact. Unfortunately, your kid’s got bullied and what to do about it. So ideally prevention is better than a cure, but today we’re going to be talking about the cure, your kids getting bullied in what you can do.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And one resource you can use that’s great is stopbullying.gov. And this has a lot of resources, including what the laws are in your state, what the current suggestions are about bullying. A lot of videos, a lot of different things you can read. So stopbullying.gov also has some very specific bullying resources for different situations. For example, if a child with a developmental disability is being bullied. There’s some unique situations that we may not cover in the scope of our talk today, but I think it’s a great resource for you to use.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Okay. So what happens if your kid’s being bullied? Now, we addressed earlier that this is a very serious situation. It’s one that shouldn’t be addressed with, “Hey, just toughen up, or just stop listening to them.” It can have serious effects beyond the actual event that happens. It can have long term effects that affects their grades, their mental health, they can be depressed, they can have a lot of other issues with being absent from school, somatic issues like feeling sick. And even as far as very serious suicidal levels of depression. And unfortunately we see stories like that all the time, and we don’t want things to get to that point for our kids or kids around our children, because that’s very traumatic and we certainly don’t want to have happen.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So one of the things that we need to understand is reporting. Now, what I mean by this is, very frequently kids don’t report bullying. We saw in our research that we’ll talk about in our next topic is that kids are frequently not reporting bullying to parents. So one thing I noted in my dissertation research, where we did benefits of martial arts for kids with bullying, is that about a third of the kids that came to martial arts, about 30%, were getting bullied. But only about 14% of the parents thought that their kids were getting bullied. So it’s about two to one that the kids were getting bullied, but not letting their parents know.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So parents frequently do not know that their kids are getting bullied. And there’s a lot of reasons like this. They don’t want to be known as a tattler, telling on the other kids. Maybe they think that they’re going to get found out that they told on the other kid, maybe it was a sibling that was bullying them. Or maybe it’s a kid that’s in their social group, along with the parents. It may be that they don’t think the parents will respond properly. And parents, I’m not blaming you for this. Because you haven’t gone through this training in this work that we’re doing now, you may not quite know what to do. You may feel like it’s a good idea to tell your kids to, “Hey, just quit listening to what they’re saying.” Or, “Toughen up.”

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Or some parents frankly have told me that they thought it was a good idea to tell them, “Push the other kid back.” Well, if the other kid’s a lot bigger than them, or they’ve got a lot of other friends, that may not be a really good answer. If your kid’s got such high self-esteem and they feel tough enough to get in a fight with the other kid, they’re probably not getting bullied. Their imbalance of power is not lower than the other kids. This is a conflict, not a bullying situation. So you’re not reading the situation right. If it’s really a bullying situation, you’ve got to know that it’s a different type of response that you’ve got to help them with. So your child really needs you to help. So these are very common situations.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Another thing that’s important is how do you address the school? And we’ll be addressing this in a further talk so that you get the right response from the school. So first thing that we need to understand is what to do if your kid’s being bullied. First one is focus on your child.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Number one, never tell your child to ignore the bullying. Never. This is a very bad strategy. Ignoring bullying doesn’t make it go away. What the child is going to hear from you is a couple of things. What they typically will hear is that your child will hear that they’re not important. And what they’re hearing is that you’re ignoring it. If they could ignore it, they wouldn’t be coming to you to ask for help. Kids are smart. They would know if ignoring it was going to make them feel better. Often trying to ignore bullying is going to make the problem more serious because the child who’s bullying them is getting some benefit by bullying them.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And if they have the benefit by bullying the kid, if they have the response for the kid, if the child who’s bullying your kid is getting some benefit, they’re getting some social benefit or personal benefit or improvement in status by bullying your child, and your child is ignoring them right now, or they’re crying or they’re upset, or there’s some response, if they continue to do what they’re doing and ignore them, they’re going to continue to escalate that because they get some positive benefit from it, the bully, the one who’s doing the bullying. So ignoring it is not going to be a good strategy.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Number two. And this is really common, you may not think you’re doing it, it’s don’t blame your child. Now you may not think that you would ever do this, but very common is for a parent to say to your child, “Well, what did you do to him? What did you do to make him bother you? Why did you talk to him that way in the first place?” Does that sound familiar? It might be a reasonable, “If you didn’t do what you did, they wouldn’t be bothering you in the first place. What did you do to aggravate the other child?” That’s not going to solve the problem in a bullying situation. If it was conflict it’d be different. Why’d you have an argument with the kid? There’s just not an imbalance of power there. So don’t blame your child.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Three is listen carefully. It’s pretty easy to say that we have a pervasive problem in the world that people don’t listen very well. In my work as a psychotherapist, I work with couples and I work with individuals. It’s probably the number one issue that I see. People just don’t listen very well. And we tend to not listen to our kids because we think as they start explaining a problem that we know what we’re hearing before we hear the whole story. So listen carefully. Find out what’s going on. Ask them to describe the problem, ask them who was involved. Ask them what was happening with the other kids in the situation because in a bullying situation, it’s not just the kid who was being bullied, your child, but the kid who’s bullying. Also, maybe other kids that were involved. Were there other kids that were egging the kid who’s bullying on? Were there kids that were helping you, are there other kids that are supporting you in this? Because that might give you some information on whether or not your kid can have support in school. Listen carefully and get all the information.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Okay. Four, find out about the bullying tactics. What was the other child doing? When did the bullying happen? If you do need to report this to the school or you’re going to talk to the school principal about it, you need all the information. Was it in the bathroom where there were no teachers and there’s no cameras? There’s nowhere where for the teachers to notice this information. Was it on the playground behind the tree where the teachers weren’t there? Has it happened many times? How frequently does it happen? Is it once a week? Is it twice a week? Very frequently, the most common place we see bullying is in the classroom with the teacher there. You got to make sure that you know what the situation is and the frequency. Were there other kids that would’ve witnessed the bullying? What are their names? Who are they? How can they corroborate the information?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Five, empathize with your child. Let them know that bullying is wrong and it’s not their fault. Very common. In fact, I’d say more often than not, your child’s going to blame themselves. If I just didn’t do this, they wouldn’t do that. If I just didn’t do this, what do I need to do better? Let them know it’s not their fault and they didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not their fault. They didn’t do anything wrong. And you are so glad that they had the courage to come and talk to you. Most kids won’t talk to you about it. Remember in our study about two to one, parents didn’t even know that their kids were being bullied, two to one. So you have a 50/50 chance that you’re not being told. So they have courage to come and talk to you about it. Bullying is wrong and it’s not their fault. This is a going to make a massive difference in how they feel and whether or not they’re going to come to you about issues like this in the future. So please empathize. This is probably the most important thing.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Ask your child during this time, what they think can be done to help with it. What can you do? What can the other kids do? What would they like to see happen? You want to assure them that you will think about what you can do about it and that you’re going to help them come up with some solutions.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Six. If you disagree with them, don’t criticize them about it. Don’t criticize. Just come up with some new solutions. And you can say that really simply, after you’ve empathized with them, and again do that first. So here’s a couple other options you have. This is another option. And it might be something like, don’t go to that part of the playground, or that may not be the best person to be friends with, or there may be some other options that they have. And it may be kind of obvious.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Here’s a big one. And given that my background is in martial arts. People think that I might encourage this, but number seven, don’t encourage physical retaliation. Now, where does this play in? I teach martial arts. We teach the self-defense. So when does self-defense come in? Self-defense comes in when people are in danger of physical injury, serious physical injury or death. Now bullying typically is not physical injury or death. It’s severe, it’s abusive, it’s bad, it’s wrong. It’s not physical injury or death. So they need other solutions. Physical retaliation tends, in these kind of scenarios, to escalate. And it may turn into violence, but we would consider those types of things, bullying situations, to be something that needs other types of solutions, than escalation to physical violence.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And when I say it that way, it probably seems pretty logical. We get many, many people, especially when they talk to somebody like me with the background that I have, go “Well, if they just punched them in a face, then that would just solve the problem. And they won’t bother them again.” If it’s really a bullying situation, the person’s got higher status, they’ve got more friends, they’re bigger than them. It’s going to be a completely different situation. You, as the parent might think, well yeah, but that’ll solve the problem. It’s unlikely to really solve a problem. You think it will, but imagine you in that situation, if the person’s a lot bigger than you and they had more friends, what do you think would really happen? Probably wouldn’t work. If you punch them in the face, they’re probably going to have a really easy time feeling like they can take care of you right afterwards.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So this is going to be part one of what you need to do. And I really appreciate everybody being here for part five of our Bullying Prevention, Myths, Truths and What To Do. I hope this was helpful as a good first start. Next time we’re going to talk to how you can talk to the school administration and how to contact the principals and teachers and what to do next.

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Dr. Moody is also a licensed psychotherapist and maintains a practice at Integrated Mental Health Associates (IntegratedMHA.com) where he specializes in couples therapy and mens issues.