According to research, a third of
children have suffered violent abuse at the hands of their peers. Shock!
Horror! Obviously, as a mother I can’t help but worry about Dear Daughter (DD)
when she starts school. Especially reading the news where children become
suicidal or even worse and all because of bullying. I made a list of things
that I planned to protect DD. I thought about sending her to all the martial
arts available. This didn’t happen because I was told that she was too young.
Well, she was 1.5 years old at the time; also we found out that she preferred
dancing and less physical activities in general. I then tried to have her micro
chipped, at least I will know where she will be and I can monitor her
activities 24/7. Unfortunately, I can only do it if she is a pet and obviously
it is unethical. Therefore I abandoned those plans and made a promise to myself
that when she’ll start her primary school I will make sure that the school will
have a rigorous anti-bullying tactic.

So what is bullying?  I did some research and found that bullying
is a widespread and serious problem that can happen anywhere. It is not a phase
children have to go through, it is not "just messing around", and it
is not something to grow out of.  Bullying can cause serious and lasting
harm. Bullying
involves:
people who
bully use their power to control or harm and the people being bullied may have
a hard time defending themselves; it is not accidents, the person bullying has
a goal to cause harm and incidents of bullying happen to the same person over and over by the
same person or group. Bullying can take many forms, mentally and physically for example: name-calling, spreading rumours,
hitting, punching, and shoving amongst others. But what’s on the rise is
apparently cyber bullying, which is harming others using the Internet, mobile
phones or other digital technologies. Technology is another peril to add to my
list that I must warn DD about.

Bullying sometimes is difficult to spot, but if one
day DD
shows one of these signs: comes home with damaged or missing clothing or
belongings, has unexplained injuries, has a change in eating habits, afraid to
go to school or generally acting out of the ordinary, I will immediately be
concerned and investigate.

As a parent I can better prepare DD and
hopefully she will have enough courage and character to challenge the bullying.
I will advise her that if she sees her friends being horrible to her or to others,
to tell them “Stop it.” Obviously if there were more than one perpetrator and
if she is scared, she should just walk away and act as though she doesn’t care.
I will advise her to stick together with her friends even in school, because
there’s safety in numbers. And the most important of all is that I will always
instil into her that she can talk to us her parents about anything, good or
bad, if it is good then we can celebrate and be happy with her. If it is bad
then we might be able to make it better. We just want her to know that no
matter what, she is not alone. Oh, one more thing I will always tell her to be
good and respectful to others, to treat others as she wishes to be treated
herself.