Helping Your Child Deal with Bullies

John Fuller (0:02)

I'm John Fuller here in the studio with Dr. Danny Huerta. He's a counselor, and he leads our parenting team here at the ministry. Danny, when our child is bullied, it can leave an emotional scar that lasts years, decades, a lifetime.

Dr. Danny Huerta (0:16)

Oh yeah, a lifetime even. And sometimes it actually could be considered abuse from peers and from others. So we have to look at the gravity of the word.

It can be quite traumatizing to a child, to the point that they feel sick, they won't eat, their stomach hurts, they don't want to go to that, to the school.

And what's tricky for some parents is they'll have a very highly sensitive child all the way to a child that's not highly sensitive. And both could have a huge response to what's happening in the school and could perceive different things as bullying. So what you want to do first is listen in when your child brings it up. But the impact that this has is it can leave self-doubt. It can leave these voices in a person's head. They create a tremendous amount of self-doubt, but also a lack of trust and a lack of self-confidence around people until it's addressed and reprocessed in a new way.

That the other person was having a hard time. It wasn't personal to their identity. And so it may create a social apathy to somebody where they go, I just don't want to be socially connected. It's all out of self-protection for themselves. And so we want to begin to understand with our children when there is bullying, it has a ripple effect down their development into adulthood where they begin to, it begins to take root in the deeper depths of their identity as a person. And they're still in a place of self-protection potentially all the way into their marriage, into their parenting, where a child does something or their spouse does something, and it triggers the memory of something that happened in 5th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade. And what's fascinating is some people get stuck emotionally, social emotionally, and they've seen this in trauma research. When they've been bullied in a heavy way, in a big, big way, in a very intense, abusive way in school, sometimes they get stuck socially in that and emotionally, and they deal with future events in their life as if they're still that age.

John Fuller (2:21)

I've heard that.

Dr. Danny Huerta (2:21)

Until they move past that through a tremendous amount of healing.

John Fuller (2:25)

Yeah. And that healing is available to you. If you're feeling like, oh, they're talking about something that happened to me, give us a call and connect with one of our caring Christian counselors. The details are in the show notes. Let's turn now to a conversation Focus on the Family President, Jim Daly had with Nancy Rue.

She is passionate about helping kids who have been bullied.

Nancy Rue (2:49)

The most amazing, for lack of a better word, stunning story, I think, is what really tuned me into it. I was a theater teacher, so I tended to get the misfits. The fun people. The fun people, the crazies, who didn't fit in any place else. And so I made it a point to provide an atmosphere, an environment where they could be who they were and shine and have confidence. So my radar was out for other students who weren't in the program, who didn't seem to have that niche. And there was one student whose name was Jake. I will never forget him. He wasn't one of my students, but he was best friends with one of mine. And Ming was Jake's only friend. And I would watch Jake in the hall, walking down the hall with a book in front of his face, as if he were reading a book as he's going from class to class. So we didn't have to interact.

One day, I noticed the book was upside down, so he clearly was not reading it. And I never asked just what was going on with Jake. I didn't approach him and say, so how are you doing?

His junior year, he committed suicide. And his friend Ming was absolutely devastated, and we all sat down and talked about it. And even at the time, I didn't use the word bullying. I said, what was the deal? What happened to Jake? Was he always just, I don't know, strange? And it came out over the years that Jake was horribly bullied. When I asked my daughter, who was in that group, what happened with Jake, she said, oh my goodness, they were terrible to him, especially the athletes and so forth, called him gay, and just made fun of him all the time. And then when he came out to his father, that yes, he was gay, his father kicked him out of the house.