Do you know the movie ,The Mask, in which an ordinary boring man who is ignored or teased by almost everyone in the area one day finds a mask, this man was happy to have found the mask. With this mask he dares to say than without a mask, that he was not even as shy as without a mask, the mask is a safe place to hide his own boring and shy personality. This film teaches us something about bullying and what it does to someone.
Baby, toddler, preschooler.
As a parent you are proud of your child and regularly take photos and videos to show everyone how beautiful your child is. Photos disappear into a nice photo album, on the computer, on Facebook, Hyves and private websites that are accessible to everyone. Many people are now aware of the misuse of photos of themselves or their children, but nevertheless it is wonderful to receive comments about how beautiful your child is, what a funny video it is when the child learns to stand or walk or talk . Bloopers of children are also very popular to get attention, especially on YouTube, where parents can even earn money from the number of clicks on an advertisement for their video. Even though the small child does not yet know what the parent is actually doing, he is already exposed to performing tricks in front of an audience, such as showing what he can already say, showing how he can dance or laugh or even how he can make cute faces. just like it did with mom or dad when no one was there.
Parents unknowingly turn their child into a circus attraction, which they would never have done if they had thought about it at the time. People in the area hear such wonderful stories from you about your child that they have high expectations of it. You pass around your child’s first coloring page to your visitors or post it on Facebook or Hyves to receive various positive reactions, sometimes even the report is increasingly circulated digitally. You even encourage your chin by bringing their report or work of art to visitors to collect some money, just like a poor street musician who goes around with a cap after the performance to collect money.
Insecure
Although parents with the best intentions are proud of their offspring and show that everyone is proud of them, this also makes a child very insecure. The parents fight for the talents of their children and the child is praised to the heavens for everything he or she has achieved. Only then does the child go to school in good spirits and there appears to be a child in the class who believes that his or her drawing is much more beautiful than your child’s and laughs at your child. In fact, this child encourages other children to make fun of your child because he or she cannot yet color within the lines and the other children can. Your child is very disappointed because you as a parent and those around you have told him or her that he or she can indeed color well, but now it turns out to be the opposite. And the other children in the class must be right, according to your child, because they all laugh at your child.
The frustrated parents of this sad child raise the alarm with the teacher who must immediately resolve this for your child that bullying is not allowed in the classroom. Parents and teachers will intervene for the slightest disagreement and your child will never learn to solve a problem themselves, nor does it have to because your child is used to you doing this for him or her. Without you thinking about it and your intention being to teach your child to be proud of himself and to be aware that many people around you share your opinion, you have failed to teach your child to deal with disappointment. to go. Now your child is still small and in primary school, but these are now only very small, seemingly innocent incidents. Before you know it, you’ll be off to high school.
Puberty
Your child will go to secondary school full of courage to make a new start with new classmates. But your child will soon find out that other children from primary school have come along. Your child is disappointed to see how many friends the other children have and how much difficulty they have in making friends themselves. Knowing teenagers, stories in primary school soon spread to other classmates and everything starts all over again. Your child does not dare to go against it, because that is what you always did as a parent. Although you always proudly hugged your child and gave him a kiss out of joy at all the sevens he had on the report card, you are now disappointed by the teacher who tells your child that the Dutch and English language is not nearly as good as you are. as a parent you would always have told your child. Angry and sad, your child comes home to tell you that the teacher was annoying and tells you what unpleasant comments he or she made. As a parent, you angrily call the school and blame the teacher’s mediocre teaching and poor anti-bullying actions as the guilty factor for your child’s insecure behavior.
Once again, it appears that your child is not used to being criticized for the mistakes he or she has made, but rather is used to receiving compliments for the good things he or she has made. This also appears to be the case with bullying, your child is not used to standing up for himself, as a parent you always did that when your child had an argument with a peer because you happened to be there. But in high school you are no longer there and your child does not know what to do in this situation, alone. Your child has been thrown to the lions.
As a consolation for the terrible time in primary school and now higher school, you give your child a big gift, they get a hobby they have always wanted to have, they can take part in sports or music lessons.
Your child’s talents
Once again you proudly go to your child’s competition or a music performance. Your child is so incredibly good, it turns out that she is also good according to the teacher or coach. That may be true, by being involved in sports or music your child is distracted from school for a while, he or she needs the attention to perform what he or she cannot do at school. If, after a few years, your child’s teacher or coach informs you that your child is a true talent, it would of course be exciting if your child was discovered. You can make videos during competitions or performances and post them on YouTube expecting to get a lot of thumbs up and proudly show them to your child to convince them that they shouldn’t receive negative criticism at all, that anyone who contradicts this is simply jealous because they do not possess those talents themselves.
Curious as children are, the bullies from your child’s class will meet you on Hyves or Facebook and view the photos and videos of your child from childhood where they took a bath as a baby, where they learned to walk as a toddler, where the first coloring page and where your toddler is dancing to a song from ,Children for Children,. Full of amusement, the bully copies the photos and secretly sends them to friends or prints them out and leaves them lying around at school. Once your child is confronted with this, they will sink to the ground with humiliation when they are laughed at by everyone and then hear that they found it on the internet through their parents.
Talent shows
Also in talent shows such as ,De Playbackshow, by Henny Huisman in the past or ,The Voice kids, nowadays, the parents’ competition with other children is clearly recognizable. Many parents watch ,The Voice Kids, together on Friday nights these days. The children love it so much and often imitate their favorite song and its singer. The parents enjoy seeing their child on television and encourage their child to participate in such a program. What many parents forget is that many participating children receive singing lessons, unlike your child. Once your child has been invited and can come and audition, the party atmosphere is complete. Proud parents stand behind the scenes on television watching their child do his or her best to convince the jury of their talent, just like their parents are. All the courage the parents have given their child collapses like a house of cards after they are rejected and sent home again with the advice to take singing lessons because the singing was (roughly put) out of tune. In the past, Idols still had the preliminary rounds where many young participants auditioned unprepared on television, but due to their very poor performances they were often sent home by a laughing jury, with hundreds of thousands of viewers throughout the Netherlands witnessing this enormous disappointment. And that is only because parents often do not dare to tell their child that with these singing qualities they are not good enough to dream of a singing career. Because parents do not have this courage, children have to pay for it with enormous shame and public defeat and with a lot of pain.
It was once Henny Huisman who advised over-enthusiastic parents of children to only let a child participate if it was their own choice and a child actually has talent and not just because you as parents find it exciting to see your child on television. Not that those parents have the intention to bully their child, on the contrary, they are simply too proud of their child and do not want to see that their child does not have such great talents as you as parents would like to see. The parents simply do not want to disappoint their child by saying that they are not good enough, resulting in major disappointments and letdowns.
Forgetting and forgiving
When he grows up, the memory of school will still linger. Applying for a job at a company is also difficult, the fear of being confronted with an annoying classmate from the past is very great. If there is no ex-classmate, there remains the fear that a colleague is a friend or family of an ex-classmate. Fear that bullying will continue here in the future. Fear that there are colleagues who recognize you as the child who danced to the song ,Children for children, on YouTube that your parents once posted and forgot to delete. Whether you have also come across your baby photos via your parents’ Facebook or Hyves, just like your ex-classmates.
Fear that your work will be commented on by your employer, fear that you will make mistakes and your colleagues will be disappointed with you. If things don’t turn out too well and they turn out to be very nice colleagues, it is still difficult to accept an offer for a staff party, you are not used to so much nice attention. The slightest compliment brings back the fear of being disappointed again in a short time and being looked at with crooked faces by colleagues, just like in the past at school when your parents praised you to the heavens and your classmates blamed you for this.
Campaigns
For years, various campaigns and actions have been held nationally to combat bullying, mainly in schools. To a large extent, these campaigns work fine, but do not always achieve the desired results. If a child has always been the victim of bullying, he or she will always be the victim of bullying as long as the child continues to be in that place with those people. Bullying did not stop immediately. Bullies are often identified as the main culprits of hurting and deeply hurting others. Many bullies start with very small things to try on a child, but when it turns out that a child has no ability to defend himself, he or she becomes increasingly the target of bullying that takes on increasingly larger proportions, until a child almost dies. falls down. In the last 3 months, 3 very young children have been mentioned in the news who suffered so much from bullying that they became so unhappy that they saw no other option than to kill themselves. That is very sad, but certainly not always the intention of a bully, it is the intention of this child to ultimately make the bully feel guilty for the suffering that bully has caused them
. At least, this is what the parents left behind are convinced of.
A child who kills himself because of the many unwanted bullying he has had to endure is actually still convinced when committing the act that the bullying is even his own fault . They are even aware that the bully is happy to be rid of him/her, perhaps even that this was their intention. The child realizes at that moment that the parents were the only ones who loved him or her and that he or she is hurting them, or the child wants to tell the parents that they would rather have been different than they were now. , whether they blame the parents.