Quote:
Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet
You deal with the cards you are dealt, not the cards you want to be dealt
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Yeah and if we're unfortunate enough to pick up a lot of bad cards along the way, at least play those cards in such a way that it won't further undermine your own situation... we don't have to hide who we are to feel content with it, but we don't have to advertise it either?...
In my opinion, much of bullying is a bad mix of the attacker and victim is lacking certain key social development that can make the victim more appealing... the catch is the bully usually has a better understanding of the "social economy", how one interaction can cause one person to react a certain way, which leads to the next interaction and vice-versa...
So my opinion of the solution...
1) Yes, society
should improve itself, but that will only happen only over a longer period of time, and only if we raise better kids, mend the social divide, etc... but even then, it's not "the" solution imo... it just helps reduce the natural friction caused by inequalities in personal power between peers...
2) A more practical solution (for the parents) is being involved in your child's social development. A kid can be the sweetest, most gentlest and kindest person in the group... but without learning certain social strategies, that will only get them so far. If they are trying to cope and it is only getting worse, then they may not have the social skills to analyze and fully understand the problem, much less being able to identify where they are reciprocating the interactions.
Bullies don't care about virtue signaling, but they do care about their heirarchy in a group, where most of their personal power comes from... They want the victim's status which stems from a deep seated sense of envy (believe it or a not). A peer with higher social development and sense of self would be able to unmask this quickly. However, a child who is still behind so to speak, they won't understand the power play and so they will more strongly associate with the bully's attempts to make them feel the victim. It's this victim mentality they depend on, because by undermining the self-esteem of their victims, who are usually more independent/dissociated from the rest of the group, cheats them into giving up their own personal power...
Bullies won't go after kids who are associated with a large group of folk who will be difficult to pull that child away... and they risk interacting with those individuals with stronger self-esteem in those groups who will unmask their behavior...... so they will go after the individualists, i.e. the introverts stray from the herd in some fundamental way and can be isolated... it's their independent minds that make them more quirkish, not their "victim status" (i.e. homosexual, minority, most nerdish, etc)... and those folk are not likely to be really paying attention to group dynamics to understand the attacks... so even better if those kids are struggling socially in that environment to adapt, because it means they can make repeated runs at their personal power, making them appear more powerful to their rest of the peer group...
That's part of what makes online so ripe for bullying as well (outside of anonymity)... as most of what is posted up is centered around the individual, their identity, not their "place" in the group... so it's easy to "isolate" a lone profile who be tricked into disbelieving their personal power, versus a group of folk arranged together in a clique in a physical room... would not be a tempting target at all...
In some ways, I'd say some kids are better off now than we used to be... they have better social development than we did before there was online and all that. Read this today and I thought about that specifically:
Logged off: meet the teens who refuse to use social media
https://www.theguardian.com/society/...t-social-media