Bullying Stops Here

Throughout parenthood as your children grow and develop you frequently find yourself having to deal with new incidents which you are never prepared for. No one trains you for how to deal with such scenario’s, you simply need to rely on your own experiences and hopefully a good upbringing and also research ideas and suggestions. Some of these incidents that you deal with can be positive things, sometimes it is negative things. Unfortunately this week we have had to deal with one of the negative incidents that probably happens to everyone to some scale during their childhood – bullying.

 

You may be surprised to find that it is Joshua that is being bullied.  It appears some nasty little girl has been taking the mickey out of his hair colour to the point where yesterday he came home from school very upset and in tears. We all know Josh is a big lad and a very strong character so it kind of took us by surprise that he is being a victim of bullying which is totally unacceptable in this day and age. So immediately after school Tina went and spoke to his teacher and the good news is that that have taken the comments on board and are going to keep an eye on the girl today and monitor the situation closely. But that alone was not enough to assure Josh and to calm him down. So here we are with one of those classic incidents that no-one ever prepares you to deal with. So after a bit of research and a long chat with Joshua I seem to have taken his mind off it now using a few key points.

 

1.We told him that bullying is often a case of the perpetrator having much bigger personal issues or some sort of insecurity that they are hiding behind and that the only way of masking their own issues is to make other people feel bad. So we told him not to let her get to him as clearly she has much bigger problems.

 

2. I told him that hair colour is nothing to be upset or insulted about – it is simply the colour of your hair that you have no control over, the colour doesn’t make you any better or worse than the next person. I told him that his late Nanny used to love his hair colour and that I am now very grey and would give anything to swap my grey for his hair colour.

 

3. Lastly (and this was my little idea), I googled pictures of loads of ginger celebrities and showed him all their faces. Then I said to him, “what do you think is common with all these famous actors, musicians, athletes etc.”. At first he had no idea and then I pointed out that they are ALL ginger. I then said to him, “Do you think someone look Ed Sheran, Rupert Grint, Greg Rutherford, Paul Scholes or even Prince Harry would give a monkey’s if someone called them ginger or took the mickey out of his hair colour?”. I think that made Josh feel better.

 

So fingers crossed our big boy has a better day at school today and his teacher has had a chat to this nasty little girl.