Defending Against a Bully

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In this week’s youtube video, Elizabeth asks how she can explain to a child when it is appropriate to confront a bully – particularly when schools have a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of fighting.

Or watch other videos at youtube.com/DrLaura

Raising Boys Into Men

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I was reading William Bennett’s article, “Have We Forgotten How to Raise Boys Into Men?” and realized I talk about this on my program way too often, which is a sad state of affairs.  Bennett comments:

Fashioning men has never been easy, but today it seems particularly tough. Boys need heroes to embody the everlasting qualities of manhood: honor, duty, valor, and integrity.

Mostly I hear from women who marry young guys who play video games.

Bennett goes on to state:

Without such role models, boys will naturally choose perpetual childhood over the rigors of becoming a man-as many women, teachers, coaches, employers, and adults in authority can quickly attest to today.

Even though the National Organization of (I Don’t Know What Kind) of Women continues to bleat and lie, women are better educated, more ambitious, and more successful than men today than ever before.  But we see a real decline in manhood.  Men earning college degrees have fallen from 60% in 1970 to 43% in 2006.  In 1950, only five percent of men in the prime working age were unemployed.  Today, it’s at 20%, the highest ever recorded.

But that’s not even the biggest problem.  The biggest problem we have in our society today is men are more distant from their family and children than ever before.  The out-of-wedlock birthrate is over 40%.  Fathers are missing from their boys’ lives in devastating numbers. 

And, except on 9/11 when we talked about how the firefighters were heroes because of their honor, duty, valor and integrity, we’re left with basically two images of manhood:  machismo street hoods and males who refuse to grow up.  Kay Hymowitz, who’s a great writer, talks about this in her article: “Where Have the Good Men Gone?”

Young men were tuning in to cable channels… whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences. They watched movies with overgrown boy actors… cheering their awesome car crashes, fart jokes, breast and crotch shots, beer pong competitions and other frat-boy pranks.

… It’s been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles – fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity – are obsolete. 

And then I came upon this blog by Thomas Matlock: “Raising Boys: A Dad’s Parenting Advice for Moms.” He brings up ten points about boys that moms forget or want to change.  Just a few include: “Think caveman,” ” Yes, it really is all about poop,” ” Pointless physical activity is perfect,” and “Bedtime is sacred.”

In my opinion, the basic problem we have in marriages today is a feminine disdain for masculinity and a refusal of males to rise to the occasion and act like strong men, not “wussies” afraid of their women.  We need them to embrace honor, duty, valor and integrity.  Instead we have at least two generations of boys raised to be male-looking girls.

When Bad Things Happen to Children

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On my SiriusXM show recently, I spoke about the meaning of life, and then I got this email from Lisa:

I heard part of your program today and you read about the different thoughts about the meaning of life… I’ve been thinking about that, too.

As the mother of a child who is dying of cancer, like many of us, we are losing our faith in a big powerful “daddy in the sky” that hears our prayers. I’ve heard from Christians that “God doesn’t give you what you can’t handle” but I can’t handle this. “God gives you strength to get through it” – no, He doesn’t. I’m about to lose my mind… the pain is much too great to bear. I hear that this is God’s plan, or that God needs another angel. If he needed another angel, he would just take one, HE WOULDN’T TORTURE THEM FIRST! How could he PLAN to put a child through this kind of HELL? What good could ever come out of this?

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness month. We wear gold ribbons, but only 3% of cancer research goes to childhood cancers. Does anybody care? Is the meaning of life only to do research on the “popular” cancers because they are the ones that will make money for the one who finds the cure? My son’s cancer is so rare that he gets the same chemotherapy he would have had in the 1980s… it doesn’t get researched.

Please tell me what the meaning of life is!

If you look at God as a “big powerful daddy in the sky that hears [your] prayers” and will give you what you want, and if you are a good person, you can’t help but be disappointed on a daily basis. That doesn’t seem to be the way it works. 

I know no other pain on the face of the earth that is greater than a parent having to see their child suffer and die.   I think parents would rather they suffer and die and trade themselves in for their kids.  So, this is the worst torture, but this is not a test of God.  That someone’s child or husband or wife or parent or friend gets ill and dies is not a test of whether or not there is a God.  There isn’t a test of whether or not there is a God — that’s why it’s called “faith.” To say that “I’m dubious about God” because my prayers aren’t being answered in the way that I want, is, in my opinion, never to have understood faith in the first place, but just to have played a social role in which you call yourself “religious.” 

There is no explanation for these things.  And, I agree with Lisa when she writes:  “If he needed another angel, he would just take one, HE WOULDN’T TORTURE THEM FIRST!….What good could ever come out of this?”  I like that answer of hers.  I think telling somebody this is God’s plan is a little obnoxious and I always thought it was.  It’s your assumption God is planning this.  You have no proof of that.  People go back to the story of Job and what he had to suffer and Abraham who almost wiped out his own kid until God said, “I see you really love me.  You don’t have to do this.” 

There are some important concepts and issues here.  When any of us says “I can’t handle this,” yet we make it through every day, we are handling it.  “Handling it” doesn’t mean it feels good or it’s easy; “handling it” usually means we are surviving it and doing the best we can.

I don’t understand all of the mass murders of the world — Stalin, Pol Pot, Germany, Japan. I don’t understand how that’s God’s will or God’s plan. It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.  And I don’t know how to put it together.  I don’t know how it’s God’s plan to have little children put in ovens and killed.  Or mommies and their children shot to death and put into a hole in the ground, naked.  I don’t understand how any of that is God’s plan.  So, I have no answer to that. 

This was not a theological thing where I was going to explain what life really means, other than there’s always been horror.  It’s like the horror films you see in the movies where there’s evil and someone in the church or somebody else finally squelches the evil and at the end you see the evil creeping up through the ground again. 

There is evil, there is disappointment, there is pain, there is everything.  So, ultimately, whether you really believe in God or not, we really need to hold on to each other.  There is something about touching the hand of another who corroborates your pain.  That’s why with parents in this situation, I always tell them to find other parents in this situation.  They will be the first ones to hug you and they won’t get tired of hearing from you like other relatives will.  It’s not they get tired, per se, it’s just they can’t do anything to help and it’s upsetting, so they don’t want to hear it anymore.  They are not being bad, they just don’t know how to fix it. They feel guilt and they feel uncomfortable and then they start feeling anger.  So, to go to people who have been there and done that is the way we hold on to each other.  Some people call that behavior the way God helps you go through things which are inexplicable. 

So, let’s not call bad things that happen “God’s plan,” because that hurts people.  God planned to hurt my kid?  You’re gonna tell me, there’s some higher power and I’m supposed to rise above that pain and say absolutely “I adore you?”  I think it’s a horrible thing to tell people.  I don’t think it’s good to tell kids God’s an all-powerful “daddy in the sky” who can do anything.  Well, then why isn’t he doing it for me?  I don’t like when people walk out of a bus that just been in a crash and they are alive and everyone else is dead and they say, “but for the grace of God.”  What the heck does that mean?  God intentionally wiped them out and kept you?

I think we want to feel special like we feel to a parent.  God is some kind of extension of parenthood.  We sometimes don’t realize how cruel we sound.  So, here’s my frame of reference for all of this.  There are evil things people do because they are evil.  There are horrible things that happen just because there are horrible things that happen.  The human body has weaknesses and that’s just the way it is.  There aren’t cures for everything because we are not good enough yet to produce them.  It’s hard to get money for things only a few people suffer from – Lisa is right about that.

The bottom line is we’ve got to hold on to each other.  That’s the immediate salvation: to hold on to each other’s love, support, and kind feeling.  It’s irrelevant if bad things are happening or not.  The way to make it through life, I believe, is to really be compassionate and to be open to compassion.  That’s what helps you get through the things that are inexplicable and horrible.

Pedophilia is Normal Say Some Mental Health Pros

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About 10 years ago, there was a major point I could not get people to see or believe. I said the sole end game of the liberalization of sexuality in our culture was to have sex with children. 

You look at societies throughout history and there are many societies in which having sex with children was okay.  You look at a place like Afghanistan and unless the men want to have babies, they do boys and animals.  This is nothing new on the face of the earth.  But, in western civilization, this is an issue and I said back then the end game was to have sex with kids. 

So, I found an article on Fox News titled “Mental Health Group Looks to Remove Stigma From Pedophilia,” which says:

“A group of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals say it’s time to change the way society views individuals who have physical attractions to children.

The organization, which calls itself B4U-Act, is lobbying for changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the guideline of standards on mental health that’s put together by the American Psychiatric Association.”

The DSM is the one where you look up a number for the disorder so the insurance companies will pay.  And, let me remind you for the umpteenth time:  there is nothing in psychology that makes it a science.  What goes in and out of the DSM as a disorder is based on social pressures and voting.  It has nothing to do with science.  I want you all clear…psychology is NOT a science.

“The group says its mission is to help pedophiles before they create a crisis, and to do so by offering a less critical view of the disorder.”

That’s just a bunch of bull and it’s words.  Words sell things, and even “nice” words can be co-opted to do some awful things.

“B4U-Act said that 38 individuals attended a symposium in Baltimore …[and] the speakers in attendance concluded that “minor-attracted” individuals are largely misunderstood and should not be criminalized even as their actions should be discouraged.”

I said a long time ago the end game of all this social liberalization (unknown to people even amidst the social liberalization) was to do your kids and not be criminalized for it, and this is what this article refers to.

Many of you may not know or may not remember the American Psychological Association published the infamous “Rind article” in its 1998 Psychological Bulletin.  This was a study which downplayed the impact of men having sex with boys, finding quite a few of the boys remembered their molestations positively, and not every child who has been molested has problems.
 
That’s like saying “I shot you in the head and you survived; therefore getting shot in the head is not a bad thing.”  This article was published by the American Psychological Association, and it said essentially man/boy sex was okay as long as the boys consented, because it was “love.”

I went on the air after the Rind article was published and I was very clear about this article wanting to decriminalize screwing your kids.  Grown men screwing your boys:  “it wasn’t a bad thing, it was a ‘love’ thing.  It’s a cultural problem;  people are just misunderstanding it.”

Well, I went ballistic and I got everyone in my office on the phone to Congress, and I asked the audience to do the same. I want to tell you the upshot, and I’m going to take all the credit for it.  It was my pressure which made Congress condemn the study and the American Psychological Association for the first time in its entire history backed down and apologized and the president of the American Psychological Association found another job.  I am proud to say I had enough power to mobilize enough people.  And Rind and his buddies were still invited to talk everywhere and were still published in other places.
 
Well, that may have happened, but we still have mental health professionals going to a symposium from a group which looks to remove the stigma from pedophilia.  “It’s a cultural thing.”  If the culture allows it, it’s not a bad thing, they say.  It’s not a bad thing for example in Afghanistan.  So, if it’s the norm (like Rome before it fell), what’s the big deal?  This is savage and all I can say is, I warned you.
 
I want you to understand the attempt to normalize screwing your children is still on in full gear.
 
They refer to pedophiles as “minor-attracted individuals.” How benign can you make it?  That’s why I call things as they are.  There needs to be clarity.  When you say “minor-attracted individuals,” you can follow it up with “are largely misunderstood and should not be criminalized.”  So, don’t be impressed just because someone is a psychologist or a psychiatrist.  You have to be very afraid because people get into positions of power to change things.  If I were a pedophile and I wanted to get it normalized and not criminalized, I would secretly and quietly get a bunch of my buddies and we’d join the psychological associations and teacher associations –  everywhere there are kids — and get in positions of power.  And then we’d gently start using different words (i.e., words that don’t shock, words that don’t alarm, words that don’t send up red flags) and slowly make it happen.  Remember the Rind study said it was not a problem; kids were not hurt by this.  And the American Psychological Association actually published that.

You Don’t Need Preschool for Your Kids

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You know how negative I am about anything having to do with preschool, daycare, or any of that.  We’re raising children here.  If you don’t want your kids around, I guess you could use preschool and daycare for that.  If you don’t want to program your life around your kids, you’ll use preschool and daycare to help you.  If you know you are a really crappy parent, you can use them too.  If you are in dire straits and don’t have another option right now (temporarily), I guess you’ll use them.  There are many reasons to use preschool and daycare, but many of them can’t and shouldn’t be supported.

A recent article I read (entitled “Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School“) reported new research showed that trying to “teach” kids at younger and younger ages backfires.  Anxious parents are so eager that their child “gets ahead” that they’ve even taken to reading books to babies still in the womb.  Teachers are pressured to make kindergartens and nursery schools more like school, and even the “No Child Left Behind Act” urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.

But direct instruction actually limits a young child’s ability to learn.  Teaching allows kids to learn specific things, but they need more opportunities for exploration and play so they can “discover” on their own.  They need a Mommy and a Daddy to give them a stable, supportive home and lots of love.

Head Start has always been a failure.  I knew it was a failure back in the 1960s.  And now, one study shows that 75% of mothers hand their iPhones over to their kids, thinking that will make them smarter.  App makers are marketing directly to parents who are looking to help their children as young as 4 months old get a head start on learning.  If you type in “toddler” and “educational” into the App Store, you’ll find more than 800 apps specifically marketed to children under the age of 3.  One town in Maine is spending $200,000 on iPads for its entire incoming kindergarten class.  So the question is, do iPads or smartphones or toddler-marketed apps really make young kids smarter?

The bottom line?  NO.  In fact, the American Association of Pediatrics says children under the age of 2 should not be seeing anything on a screen of any kind, whether it’s an iPhone or a television set.

Parents are too often looking for that edge to make their children the smartest.  The most important thing you can do as a parent is interact with your child.  You do not need an iPad or fancy software or a preschool or a daycare to make your child learn.  They do it every day, all day, in many different ways.  Let kids just be kids.

Vote for Non-Union, Single-Sex Classrooms

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New York City recently issued a progress report on the difference between non-union and union charter schools.  The 49 non-union charter schools operating in New York City significantly outperform the charter schools whose teachers operate under a contract negotiated by the United Federation of Teachers, which puts a stranglehold on what the school can do.  Non-union charter schools earned an overall average score that converts to a B-.  The union charter schools’ average was nearly 10 points behind the non-union schools, earning these schools an average grade of C-.  In each of the three categories in which the schools were graded (attendance, student efficiency rates, academic progress or improvement on New York State English, Language Arts, and Math exams), the non-union charter schools outperformed the UFT-represented charter schools.

We ought to drop-kick the unions out of our schools.  The unions are not there to make sure your kids get a good education.  The unions are there as a political bully group and money-making apparatus.

I’ve said it a zillion times and will continue saying it whenever given the opportunity:  in addition to non-union schools, our children should also be educated in single-sex classrooms.  Simply putting girls in one room and boys in the other is not the point.  In fact, there have been public schools which did just that, and had everything happen the same as usual.  That gives you a bad outcome.  The idea of the single-sex education format is it creates opportunities that don’t exist in the co-ed classroom.  Teachers can employ strategies in the all-boys classroom and in the all-girls classroom which don’t work well or at all in the co-ed classroom.  So, the teachers need appropriate training in professional development.

In parts of Alabama, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa and Illinois there has been a dramatic improvement in grades and test scores after adopting single-sex classrooms, but that’s because they did more than just put the girls in separate rooms.  In each of the schools examined, teachers received training in practical gender-specific classroom strategies and the best practices for gender-separate classrooms.  Researchers at Stetson University in Florida completed a three-year pilot project comparing the single-sex classrooms with co-ed classrooms at a particular elementary school.  Students in the fourth grade were assigned to either single-sex or co-ed classrooms.  All other relevant parameters (class size, teacher training, etc.) were matched.  Here’s how it came out:

 Boys in co-ed classes:  37% scored “proficient.”
 Boys in single sex classes:  86% scored “proficient”
 Girls in co-ed classes: 59% scored “proficient”
 Girls in single-sex classes: 75% scored “proficient”

What’s interesting is, when they do the training, you see a whole difference in how the boys’ classrooms and the girls’ classrooms look.  For example, in the boys’ classrooms, you’ll see boys all over the room.  They often have music on, they’re given something to do with their hands and they’re given individual projects.  In the girls’ classrooms, they’re all sitting there lined up, sweet, compliant, and listening.  Girls and boys are different.  Boys bounce off walls and do much better when you don’t constrain them to a seat.  When some of the boys were in co-ed classrooms, they were labeled as “learning disabled” or with ADHD.  Many of the boys who scored “proficient” in the single-sex classroom had previously been labeled as having ADHD.

The proof is there.  At minimum, there’s no distraction in single-sex classrooms.  But you’ve got the ACLU, the National Organization of “I Don’t Know What Kind of” Women, the American Association of University Women and other groups jumping up and down screaming that this is some kind of discrimination.  This kind of blind, ignorant hysteria is really annoying because it doesn’t speak to the needs of the children.

So, in non-unionized charter schools, kids do better.  Single-sex classrooms, where the teachers are specifically trained to deal with how girls and boys learn are superior.  If you don’t have access to those, then try homeschooling.  Notice how you teach your sons and daughters differently, because you know how to get their attention, and it’s different with each gender.  The little girls are just dying to please, and the little boys are bouncing off the walls.  They don’t have to be ADHD to bounce off the walls.  They just have to be male.

For Adult Ears Only?

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Families go through tough times when there’s marital strife, separation or divorce, and kids are emotionally the most vulnerable.  Is it appropriate to tell them why you’re not choosing to date others at this time?

Or watch other videos at youtube.com/drlaura

Bullies CAN Be Stopped!

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If it seems to you that bullying is getting worse, you’re right.  It seems to be happening at earlier ages, with more frequency, and now we’ve got “cyberbullying” so the entire universe can get in on humiliating someone.  This is not just about kids – “poop” rolls downhill and kids are the last stop.

If you look at our society, you can hardly find a place where there isn’t bullying.  Kids hear about the drug cartels coming into the United States and being in the hills in Arizona and other places bullying and threatening others. 

I also made a decision recently.  My decision is it will be extremely rare for me to ever be interviewed on television again, because it’s mostly a format for bullying.  When I started out 35 years ago, and you were invited to a TV show, basically, they wanted to learn something from you, so they’d ask questions to get information.  There are almost no journalists left – because TV is basically a pulpit for bullying.  Talk radio has become that too.  The tons of yelling and screaming and name-calling and beating people up who can’t defend themselves is just standard.  Then there’s music – the music that many young people listen to is ugly, mean and threatening.  Look at the videos – they’re all “macho:” threatening, mean or hyper-sexed, or hyper-sexed and threatening and mean.  There’s hardly a place kids can turn.  It’s become abusive.  Our society is largely abusive, so I’m not surprised that we’re seeing kids acting it out. Our kids are a product of this culture, which has gone to hell in a handbasket, in my opinion.

I have a bunch of statistics about this stuff, and then I’m going to tell you what will stop all the bullying.  Unfortunately, I don’t think what will stop bullying will ever actually happen.  Here are some eye-opening facts:

1. The top 5 states for school bullying are California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Washington.
2. 77% of students are bullied mentally, verbally, and physically, and half of these incidents go unreported, because nothing happens if it is.
3. Every 7 minutes a child is bullied on a playground.  Adult intervention?  Only FOUR PERCENT of the time.  No intervention? More than 85% of the time.
4. 46% of the males and 26% of the females reported that they had been in physical fights, according to school bullying stats.  Keep in mind this is not conflict, yet they keep introducing “conflict resolution” into schools.  There IS no conflict in a bullying situation.  There’s a bully and a victim.  Only one of them has aggression in mind.  In a conflict, both of them do.
5. Bullying is the most common form of violence in our society.
    

The impact on the victims is horrible.  In middle school, I was bullied because a mother was an immigrant – a legal immigrant, but that didn’t matter.  I got bullied anyway.  A couple of times I got into a fist fight when someone called my mother a name, but it was nothing like it is now. 

So they tell kids if they’re a victim, avoid the perpetrator; avoid areas where there are no teachers around (only 4% of them intervene anyway, so what’s the point); never go into the locker room or bathroom by yourself, sit in the front of the bus, and on and on.

What the hell is this?  Telling a little kid that he or she has to be completely paranoid? 

Hell no!  You need to take them to martial arts and teach them self-defense.  All children should learn self-defense.  One thing bullies of any level enjoy is that good people tend to be total wusses.  Frightened, passive wusses at that.  So teach your kids to stand up for themselves and other people.

I want to go back to those numbers about people who intervene – 85% of the time no one intervenes, and 4% of the time someone intervenes (I’m not sure what the other 11% do).  Usually, other kids just stand by.  That’s why there are bullies. You can say all you want, but bullies aren’t important because they’ve done good deeds or are the best students in the class.  They’re important because they’re considered dangerous.  And the reason there are bullies is because other people do nothing, so they get even more dangerous.

Bullying would stop if the kids who stand by are taught by their parents to intervene, whether physically or verbally.  Bullies need to be shown they’re not getting the fear or the respect they think they have (in their own minds of course).  But I know this will never happen. 

Do you raise your kids to take on “pieces of garbage” bullies?  I bet not.  It’s the job of each one of us to stand between evil and the innocent, but that’s not how we bring up our kids, is it? 

I’ve said many times:  “You don’t swim with the sharks and you don’t feed the sharks.”  So the reason bullying will continue to grow is because we’re producing more “piece of garbage” kids, we defend them, protect them, show sympathy for them, and don’t stop them.  So I’m not surprised bullying is growing – that’s all kids see around them. 

Teach your kids how to defend themselves physically and how to be stronger against verbal nonsense, while teaching them to pound the heck out of bullies one way or another.  Report them.  Reward kids who report them.  Reward kids who stop them.  It’s time we started rewarding people who put themselves in harm’s way to protect someone else instead of just saying “Oh, we have a ‘zero tolerance’ policy here,” which only forces people into not responding.