Individual
part
Family
and school communication
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| https://www.google.com.hk/ |
Case
A 13year old
girl Megan Meier hanged herself in a bedroom closet in October 2006. She
struggled with attention deficit order and depression in addition to issues
with her weight.
Before her
death, a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans asked Megan to be friends on MySpace.
The two began communicating online regularly. But later, Josh began saying he
didn’t want to be friends anymore, and the messages became crueler that he told
Megan that the world would be a better place without you. The cyber bullying
escalated when additional classmates and friends on MySpace began writing
disturbing messages and bulletins.
See
more case you can click:
http://nobullying.com/six-unforgettable-cyber-bullying-cases/
http://nobullying.com/six-unforgettable-cyber-bullying-cases/
Parent's role
Everything
related to children will all comes back to the parents. No one can take place
of the parents’ position. Parents have ideal opportunity to step in and
encourage children who suffering from cyber bullying to speak out and fight
this kind of victimization.
Even
though parents play a really important role, but they still could get help from
others, for instance, from schools, from the community, from the law
enforcement community. Parents can recruit allies, like other parents, the
school librarian or library media specialist, their technology teacher,
guidance counselors and even their pediatrician, and also can ask your local
parent teacher association, scouts, Boys or Girls' Clubs, and community child
protection advocates. If they could all join together, they can address the
problem more effective. But maybe Chinese parents don’t have much choice like
parents in western countries, but at least they could cooperate with school.
However,
parents better first figure out what they can do by themselves to help their
children. When cyber bullying is concerned, parents need to know when and how
to react. They need to be the one that kids trusted when things go wrong online
and offline; kids can go for them ask for help. But parents often are the one
that kids avoid telling things when things go wrong online. Because they tend
to be overreact when cyber bullying happened, for example, parents will call
other parents; call school, blaming the victim or taking away Internet
privileges. So, most children avoid telling their parents about cyber bullying
incident happened to them, and children fear that parents will make things
worse. Unfortunately, parents also sometimes under react, they think it is no
big deal and their children are strong enough to solve it and recover from the
pain.
Under
this situation, parents have to be supportive of your child. Meanwhile, they
should understand that words and cyber attacks can definitely wound a child
easily and have a lasting effect. These attacks follow your child into your safe
home and wherever your children go online. When up to millions of accomplices
target or humiliate your child online, the emotional pain will be very real,
and very serious. So, deal with it properly is really important. Besides,
Parents also need to understand that a child can be both cyber bully and the
victim of cyber bullying, and sometimes they will go back and forth between
these two roles. They may even not realize they are involved in cyber bullying.
Under this circumstance, family education is crucial; they can teach children
how to deal with it, teach them from right and wrong. Beyond that, parents can
let the school know what happened, so the guidance counselor can keep an eye on
in-school bullying and they can help your child handle things when they are not
at home. It is important that parents are there to provide the necessary
support and love. Make children feel secure.
Importance of education
Education can help
preventing and dealing with cyber bullying. The first person who can give
education to kids and teenagers will be their parents. Kids need to pay
attention about that they will become inadvertent cyber bullies; they have taken
accountable for their actions and should not stand by and allow bullying to be
acceptable. Parents need to teach them not to ignore the pain of others.
If their child
becomes victim of cyber bullying, they can teach their kids to step away from
the computer and encourage them to find ways to calm down. Helping children
find their own way which could help them regain their center of life. Also,
teaching them the consequences of their actions, giving them some real examples
and guide them doing replace thinking. They need to teach children that remain
silence when others are being hurt are not acceptable. If people all not allow
the cyber bullies to embarrass and hurt others, cyber bullying will quickly
stop. So at last, our children will be safer both on and off line. However, the
most important thing is parents and school should cooperation with each other
in order to create a generation of good cybercitizens, controlling the
technology instead of being controlled by it.
Many cyber
bullying event include some form of hacking or identity theft. Country like
American has specific laws which people can use it to protect themselves, but
in mainland china, in HK, or in Japan, there is no law. So, under this
situation, parents and school are playing a more important role to support
their children.
If parents help
their kids understand how much bullying hurts, how in many cases words can hurt people, fewer may
cooperate with the cyber bullies. They will think twice before sending a
hurtful e-mail, or visiting a cyber bullying site, or allowing others to take
videos or cell phone pictures. We need to teach our children not to remain
silence while others are being cyber bullied. It is also important to teach
them sometimes there is no necessary for them to solve problems by themselves;
they can come to parents for help. But if parents expect children to trust
them, parents need to be worthy of that trust.
If give an
anonymous method of reporting cyber bullying Web sites, profiles, children and
parents can help put an end to cyber bullying entirely. Parents can cooperate
with school, report it and then the school administration, community groups and
even police can receive these anonymous tips and could take quickly action to
shut down the website and stop the cyber bullying.
Parents
should not only educate their own children to protect themselves, but also need
to teach them how to be a good witness or positive bystander to help stop the
bullying.
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| https://www.google.com.hk/ |
Parents
Be an example and
teach them early
Children
will learn how to behave themselves by watching you. If parents speak to other
person, like to the waiter, in a mean or abusive way, children will learn it
and they will unconsciously involved in cyber bullying. This means that parents
are teaching their children bullying is acceptable.
Help
children develop anti-bullying and anti-victimization habits as early as
preschool. Teaching him what shouldn’t do, like hitting, teasing, and
mean to others. Guiding your child think about how the person being hurt by
words might feel. Also, teaching children what they could do, for example, the kindness,
empathy, and fair.
In
my opinion, the most difficult part is to teach children how to say no if they
experience or witness cyber bullying. It may help to have a role play or
telling story in order to teach children what to do and with this training
children will be confident when handle this situation.
Talk to children
Research
shows that parents always be the last one who knows their children are being bullied
or bully others. Parents can form a habit that having a conversation with
children every day, spending a few minutes asking open ended questions about
how he spend the day and what happened in school and in rest time. If children feel
comfortable talking with you about all these, they will come to you when
cyber bullying happens. Build trust first, if children won’t tell, cooperate
with school, using teacher and parents association to monitor children in
school will be helpful.
Most
children tend to remain silence to anyone else when they experience cyber
bullying, especially to adults. So it is important for parents and
teachers to learn what the signs are, knowing what behaviors children have are
the signs which show that they are experience cyber bullying. Those signs might
include frequent missing personal belongings, having headaches or
stomachaches, avoiding recess or school activities, strange silence, sleep
problem and nightmare, etc.
If
children show these behaviors, and parents suspect your children might experiencing
cyber bullying, first parents should talk with the teacher and then observe the
peer interactions together to make sure the suspicions right or wrong. The last
step will be having a conversation with the children. Remember don’t
overreact.
Setting rules in
house
Children
need to hear from parents clearly that there is no tolerable for him to
bully, it is not normal to be bullied, and it is not good to just watch other
kids are bullied without taking any actions. Make sure your child knows that if
he is bullied you will help him. Parents also need to make sure children know
what bullying is, because many children are not understand that bullying
is harmful. The healthy habits your practices at home will carry over to other
settings.
Positive
bystander
Research
shows that kids who witness bullying often feel powerless and seldom intervene.
However, kids who take action can have a powerful and positive effect on the
situation. Kids can also help each other by providing support to the victim
instead of giving extra attention to the bullying, or reporting what they
witnessed to an adult call for help.
Teach your child
about cyber bullying.
Cyber
bullying includes sending mean, vulgar, or threatening messages, emails or
images online, posting private information about another
person, pretending to be someone else in order to make that person look
bad, and intentionally excluding someone from an online group.
Use
Technology to Monitor Technology
Sometimes
parents have to use technology in order to keep your child’s relationship with
technology healthy. There is a problem that parents cannot compete with
children when using technology most of the time, but try your best to learn.
For instance, if parents find that your child is using his/her phone or still
online late at night and doesn’t get enough sleep, you can turn off the phone
at a given time at night. Parents can also become administrator on your child’s
social networking sites like Facebook or put blocks on YouTube.
Parents
can have texting history from child’s phone mailed to parents, and it doesn’t
mean parents have to read all of their texts. Texting conversations are
personal privacy, unless parents are doubt it children are experiencing cyber
bullying. But parents need to make sure telling children about this kind of
monitor and doing that is for their safety in order to gain their trust.
Research show that the more time kids spend online, the more likely he will experience cyber bullying. So parents should limit their online time. There’s a simple litmus test that parents can teach their children about online posting: if you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face or you would not feel comfortable having your parents see it, then don’t post it, or take it down immediately.
Some
adults may under react when they observe bullying because they think it is a
typical phase that childhood must be endured or they think it can help children
be stronger. Adults should understand that bullying does not have to be a
normal part of childhood. All forms of bullying are harmful to all the
involvers and the effects may last long from childhood to adulthood, and it may
cause depression, anxiety, substance abuse, family violence and even criminal
behavior.
Effectively
address bullying requires the collaboration of school, home, and community. If
they all work together, cyber bullying is one people can avoid.
Family &school
Contact the
school
Find
out whether the school has anti-bullying policy or not. Making sure the school
has the ability or not to address the situation when bullying happens. Make an
appointment to speak to a school counselor or school administrator. Schools
often don’t have the resources to monitor everyone and everything all the
time, and need parents’ help to prevent cyber bullying. Parents and
school should cooperate with other, monitor students’ behavior both in school
and in home.
Whether
your kid has been bullied or not, you should know what his school is doing
to address bullying. Research shows that “zero-tolerance” policies aren’t that
effective, ongoing educational programs which can help create a healthy social
climate are work better. This means teacher should teach kids at every grade
level to be kind to each other. If school does not have effective bullying
strategies and policies in place, talk to the principal and advocate for
change.
In
mainland China, situation may be different from other country, students there
basically had no time to surf on the internet when they were in high school,
but people should pay attention to the college students. However, it is
difficult for Chinese parents work with college teacher. College students are
adults even though they are not mature like their parents, and they want to be
independent so less talk with their parents, also they may separated with their
parents. All in all, when children like this experience cyber bullying, it is
hard for parents to know it. But it seems that the university also lack of
attention to this problem. And when I write this paper, I know more about what
is cyber bullying and it made me remember things happened in mu university in
Beijing, many of my friends did involved in cyber bullying cases without
realize it. I think for Mainland China there is long way to go.
Schools should
be more responsible
Experts
say that all school officials should be aware of their actions and the impact
they have on both bullies and victims. For example, the coach or teacher who
encourages his favored students to 'discipline' an outcast is in effect creating
a bullying situation that encourages ganging up on someone. (Hank Nuwer)
children are receiving education in school, so teacher’s behavior also had a
huge effect on children’s behavior. According to this, teacher should pay
attention to themselves not to do things like we mentioned before to encourage
students bullying other people without conscious.
No
matter how high-tech the bullying gets, age-old rules for civility still apply
and schools and parents should remind children of the basics. No matter students
are online and offline, the bottom line is treating people with respect.
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| https://www.google.com.hk/ |
Theory part
When
parents cooperate with school, it is not only having trust between these two,
but also includes the trust from students. One of the solution we mentioned before
is that monitor children’s texting, but imagine the rebellious teenagers, they
may think parents offend their privacy and being angry. So during this process,
trust is a must and also the negotiation skills. Negotiation skills are also
useful when dealing with operation between schools and family, take Japan for
example, cyber bullying can ruin school’s reputation, and if it happens or the
school fail to deal with it, parents will not allow their students go to that
school. At the meantime, the student who misbehaves himself online will bring
shame on his own family, so the collaboration between family and school is
win-win cooperation. If one of them hesitates to take action, one side can gave
examples to persuade the other side. Also, telling tales and gave real examples
are an effective way to educate children how to react to cyber bullying.
So,
here in this family and school part, we can use trust, negotiation, persuasion
and telling tales to help them cooperate with each other better.
Conclusion
In conclusion, both parents and school have the responsibility to educate the students how to deal with cyber bullying, and at the mean time, both of them should behave themselves, be a good example for children in order to better teach children what they should do and not. And if cyber bullying happens, schools definitely will have more specialist people who can use technology to stop cyber bullying, parents can call for help. But they should cooperate with each other to monitor student’s behavior, if anything wrong is being find, they can take action quickly to stop the hurting.
Reading:
1. The hidden challenge of cross-border negotiation, James K.Sebenius, Harvard business review
2. Win-win negotiation Expanding the pie
3. Establishing trust and building a relationship
4. The decision to trust, Robert F. Hurley
5. Telling tales, Stephen Denning
References：
- http://cyberbullying.us/parents-response-to-cyberbullying-what-to-do-when-your-child-is-the-bully/
- http://stopcyberbullying.org/parents/whats_the_parents_role.html
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/bullying-what-schools-par_b_4103901.html
- http://www.education.com/reference/article/cyberbullying-assessment-high-school/
- http://nobullying.com/six-unforgettable-cyber-bullying-cases/
- http://community.norton.com/t5/Ask-Marian/Cyber-Bullying-in-Asia-Notes-From-My-Trip/ba-p/930235
- http://cyberbullying.us/research/facts/
