Bullying: Who should be doing the doing?

Photo credit: anitapatterson
from morguefile.com

"The Government have taken away any authority to bring up our children. Children need to learn boundaries and sending kids home on suspension is not adequate. Everyone needs to get together and start addressing this for our children."

A further call to action over addressing the bullying issue in our schools. I asked earlier “What you gonna do about it?”
And more to the point, who is doing the doing?
It seems that that the solution lies with all of us:

• Principals and teachers need to foster such environments with the school which make bullying difficult to get away with and that remove the sigma of ‘telling’.
• Parents need honest and open relationships with their kids which foster good communication, during the good times and the bad.
• Students need to ‘look out’ for one another. Take the time to care. A strong, positive circle of friends means builds healthy and constructive self-esteem.

I tweeted “Thinkin this issue [of bullying] is born out of an overinflated avocation of Children's rights” – I want to qualify that by saying the pendulum has swung from the one extreme to the other. In my parents' day if the policeman clipped you around the ear and sent you home dad would say “What have you been up to? Let that be a lesson to you. Now, I don’t want to see you again until dinnertime, go to your room.”
Now? If the policeman clipped you around the ear and sent you home dad would say “Right, I’m going to have him up on charges for assault.”
I am in no way advocating violence toward children, merely highlighting the discrepancy in the perception toward ‘authority’.
It seems that every child has the right to be molly-coddled, wrapped up in cotton wool and told they are the centre of the universe. All this seems to lead to is an overinflated sense of entitlement.
As the declaration of Independence so eloquently put it - Everyone has the right to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” - but surely there is a rider of ‘so long as it doesn’t blatantly and wantonly impede the same goal for others.”
I think bullying, fights and stealing come under the ‘so long as’ category.
What is at the heart of each may be similar... Is it a lack of respect? Lack of care? Empathy? Or something altogether fundementally different?

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