Izzy Kalman is a long-time school psychologist with iconoclastic ideas about how to help kids deal with bullying. Often, he says, kids can actually deflect the meanness by using what I would call psychological jujitsu. For instance, Kalman suggests that when someone says, “Hey Fatso!”, the insulted child can respond, “I wish I was skinny like you. What is your secret?”
The idea is that in some cases, treating a bully like a friend is so disarming, that the bully is left without ammo. Here’s an article by a mom who, at her wits end, urged her bullied child to use this technique and wishes she’d heard of it sooner.
Today over at Let Grow we feature Kalman’s comments about a viral TikTok video that shows kids learning that each insult is like crumpling a piece of paper: The paper can never be flattened out all the way again. “It would be much more helpful to teach kids that insults are nothing to get upset about than to teach them that they cause permanent scars,” Kalman wrote on his Facebook page, which led to my post. Read it by clicking here.
Then, if you want to chat about it, you can go to our Raising Independent Kids Facebook page, where there’s a thoughtful discussion going on.
And here is Kalman’s home page for his program, bullies2buddies.
And hope you are having a great long weekend! – L.
Photo by Forest Simon on Unsplash
4 Comments
So the lesson she wants her kids to learn is once a person is insulted or called a name or in some way has their feelings hurt they are forever damaged and a victim with no hope of getting over it?i can’t even get my mind around that. Why not just seal them in a sound proof bubble the moment they’re born.
I meant the original mom of the crumpled paper video
I absolutely love this.
“It would be much more helpful to teach kids that insults are nothing to get upset about than to teach them that they cause permanent scars,”
I highly recommend the children’s book “A Little Princess” by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Sarah Crewe was the perfect example of how to react to bullying.
Instead of teaching kids they’re fragile, teach them to be anti-fragile!