海角大神

A lot of adults wonder why kids don鈥檛 often reveal that they've encountered a bully, or why they don't tell a parent or 鈥渢rusted adult鈥� 聽that they鈥檙e experiencing bullying.

What Aaron Cheese, 15, told his mom, finally, after years of dealing with it in silence, probably strikes a chord with a lot of young people:聽

鈥淗e said it was that he didn鈥檛 want to bring that home. Like, he wanted to walk in the door and just be a normal, regular kid,鈥� his mother, Jean Cheese, told NPR host Michel Martin. 鈥淎nd he also really kind of felt ashamed of how he was treated and was worried about how I would see it or how my husband would see and what our reaction to it would be.鈥澛�

Author and educator Rosalind Wiseman deconstructed that reasoning on a teen鈥檚 part a little further:聽鈥淚 think Aaron actually sums it up, that you want to put it behind you when you walk in the door. You want some peace. You want a way of looking at yourself in a different way, because you feel, when kids are bullying you, that that becomes your identity. And you want 鈥� a different way of being when you walk in the door.鈥�

That makes so much sense to me, too, as a parent. Just plain 鈥渉ome鈥� is a refuge but also a space where the fray at school can drop away and where you see yourself in the eyes of people who just love you. Telling those people about it brings the pain and drama home, so the refuge goes away.

Researchers tell us, too, that, developmentally, adolescents typically feel they鈥檙e supposed to be working things out themselves, not running to an adult, but especially if they feel there鈥檚 any possibility the adult could overreact or act without them and make things worse in the tricky social milieu at school.

Seattle-based Committee for Children offers more reasons. And the Youth Voice Project found, after surveying 12,000 students throughout the US, that the advice we adults typically give kids 鈥� e.g., 鈥渢ell the person how you feel,鈥� 鈥渨alk away,鈥� 鈥渢ell the person to stop,鈥� 鈥減retend it doesn鈥檛 bother you鈥� 鈥� did make things worse for the respondents 鈥渕uch more often than they made things better.鈥澛�

What helped? The survey found that, when an adult is brought in, the Top 3 most helpful things were 鈥渓istened to me,鈥� 鈥済ave me advice鈥� on how to handle the situation, and 鈥渃hecked in with me afterwards to see if the behavior stopped." Very often that helper adult is someone at school.

The Top 3 ways friends or peers could help 鈥淪pent time with me,鈥� 鈥淭alked to me,鈥� and 鈥淗elped me get away.鈥� And note this about peers: The Youth Voice Project authors found that 鈥減ositive peer actions were strikingly more likely to be rated more helpful than were positive self actions or positive adult actions.鈥澛燩HOTO

So if we want our children to involve us and if we want to help, our course of action seems quite clear: listen a lot, calmly, and collaborate with our children on developing a plan for dealing with the problem. If we go in 鈥渨ith guns blazing,鈥� as Ms. Wiseman put it in a 2010 interview, we really can make things worse for our kids 鈥� and we鈥檒l only give them more reason to avoid adult intervention.聽

鈥� 海角大神 has assembled a diverse group of the best family and parenting bloggers out there. Our contributing and guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor, and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. Anne Collier blogs at聽