Lauren Edmunds unpacks the language we use around bullying, urging a shift from labels to deeper understanding. She explores how all behaviour, whether aggressive or anxious, is a window into a child’s emotional world, and how support, not stigma, helps both the struggling and the hurt to grow into stronger, more resilient individuals.
Transcription: Beyond Bullies and Victims
I’m discussing bullying and victims and mean behaviour and aggressive behaviour and self-control because all of this is something that parents really, they worry about.
I think the children who are at the receiving end of aggression, those parents really do worry that their child is going to be safe.
Then the parents who have children who are giving the aggression are really worried about what their child’s going to do, and whether they’re going to get kicked out. I think, and I’m really stereotyping the worry here, I’m just broad-brushing it. But it’s so interesting that you can’t have a victim without a bully, and you can’t have a bully without a victim. The word bully is something that I really don’t like talking too much about because, actually, often it’s just somebody being mean.
Behaviour as Communication
Every single behaviour is a communication of something else. Behaviour is the manifestation of intention and thought, as well as of emotional wellness, skill and ability. It’s not the thing to be addressed. It’s the thing that tells us to look for something else that needs to be addressed.
As a school, I don’t use the word ‘bully’ because it’s a big label. In my opinion, it means targeted, directed, ongoing, mean, ugly behaviour that’s intended to destroy somebody else, and we can absolutely deal with that.
It’s just a kid who’s really struggling and acting out his struggles and being mean or ugly or sometimes even violent. We need to look at the struggle.
The question I have always had, from a school perspective, is: is the social system able to contain or hold, and be gracious, with the bad behaviour over a period of time while the child gets support?
The Role of Parents and Schools
Well, if the child is not getting support to develop the underlying cause of the behaviour, then no, the school system cannot handle that. That’s a parent problem, in my opinion. The parent needs to get a handle on that, because the school system and the children at school cannot be the brunt of a child’s dysfunction when nothing has been done about it.
Then the same thing could be said about the victim. If a child comes to my school and they always feel like they’re being targeted or attacked or picked on, we have to strengthen the child because strong children don’t get picked on on a regular basis. They stand up for themselves, they move through skill.
It can take some time, but they get there. I have a school where if a child comes to me with such high anxiety that they end up being picked on, that’s when the work starts, the beautiful work starts.
Building Skills to Stand Up
When they’re picked on, I get a chance to go say stop. I can stand right there and say, tell them to say stop. They normally say in this very squeaky voice, stop and go, okay, beautiful. How does that word feel for you? Can you say it a bit louder? Stop. Can you use their name? Stop, John.
What else can you do? What other words do you have? Can you stand tall? Can you square off your shoulders? Can you look serious? Can you lean forward, put your hands on your hips, do the Wonder Woman pose? Can you feel your power? Did he listen? Did he not listen? That’s interesting. He doesn’t believe you yet. Do you believe you? Can I help you to believe you?
All of that is very interesting because as much as I’m saying, a child’s behavior is an indication of their trauma or their distress.
The child’s positive behavior is an indication of their strength and their groundedness and their centeredness and their belief in themselves.
All behavior is a measure of what is happening below the surface, which means we don’t want to punish and make small the bad behaviour and then bring in positive behavior that is just the behavior with nothing behind it. We want the behaviour to come from somewhere solid, from some internal shift in the child.
Working With Diagnoses
When I have a child who is really dysregulated and they come to school with diagnoses like ODD or PDA, oppositional defiance disorder or pathological demand avoidance or whatever else they’re coming from a DSM point of view, their diagnosis is big and scary and everybody is, “Oh, we need to make it more comfortable for this child.”
No, we need to be very aware of what that behaviour looks like and keep that behavior there and then talk to the child behind the behaviour. Develop the child that’s behind the behaviour and then you watch.
You watch those behaviours dissipate. You watch positive, powerful behaviours slowly start to take over. The old behaviour is that pathway, that neural pathway gets weaker and weaker and you might see it every now and again. It’s a fallback. It’s a tool in their toolbox, but it gets less and less and the child starts to experience themselves in this different way.
That’s because, underlying their emotional state, their ability to move through the world has fundamentally shifted, and we drop the diagnosis. The diagnosis isn’t suddenly gone. As long as we’re seeing a doctor who can assess the child’s current state and see that things have shifted, and parents who can see that things have shifted.
I love that we can get a diagnosis and feel seen, understood, and known.
But when we get too stuck in that, when we feel like it is, “Oh, thank goodness. Now I know what it is,” and then we make excuses for that, and we forget that this child is going to be an adult we want to be proud of.
Supporting the Child as a Whole
We want to make sure that we are talking into the child’s fears and safety and anxiety and skills and sense of themselves and internal versus external locus of control and their self-esteem and their self-worth and where they get their self-esteem and their self-worth from and what diminishes it and where they are as a human being so that they can unlock all of the other skills.
That’s when I start to see an increase in, I suppose, IQ, emotional intelligence, social intelligence and intellectual intelligence. That’s when I start seeing all of that start unlocking.
It’s quite remarkable when we see the child’s behaviour as communication, not as a stigma, a label, or something to be ashamed of or punished. That we see it as, “This kid, this kid is telling me something. Let me be the person that really listens, really, really listens and does something about it.”
Now, professionally, teachers do this professionally, and they should be doing this professionally. Teachers should be developing themselves, building their own self-regulation as professional development, not just learning another literacy program, not just learning another way to discipline, but developing themselves, self-soothing techniques.
Teachers do this professionally. Parents need to be pseudo-professionals when it comes to this stuff, too. It’s not the actual job.
From a school’s perspective, the adults in the room, the teachers in the room, need to be understanding that behaviour is communication. If we label it, we risk applying the label’s symptoms to the child rather than looking at the child.
We have to do that, especially when the words’ bully’ or ‘victim’ come up, because we can strengthen and heal both children so they can become remarkable adults in our society.
