Individual part----Family and school communication

Individual part

Family and school communication

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 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/

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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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.

Knowing signs of cyber bullying

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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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

6.      The necessary art of persuasion, Jay A.Conger

References：

1. http://cyberbullying.us/parents-response-to-cyberbullying-what-to-do-when-your-child-is-the-bully/
2.   http://stopcyberbullying.org/parents/whats_the_parents_role.html
3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/bullying-what-schools-par_b_4103901.html
4. http://www.education.com/reference/article/cyberbullying-assessment-high-school/
5.  http://nobullying.com/six-unforgettable-cyber-bullying-cases/
6. http://community.norton.com/t5/Ask-Marian/Cyber-Bullying-in-Asia-Notes-From-My-Trip/ba-p/930235
7.   http://cyberbullying.us/research/facts/