Transcript for
Childhood bullying and mental health – part one
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (00:00):
It’s really important. If we are aware that children are being impacted or being affected by bullying behaviour, that we intervene really early and we try and wrap them around with support services and supportive networks within their family environment and their school environment.
Narrator (00:19): Welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast.
Nicole Rollbusch (00:25): Hi, I’m Nicole Rollbusch. This episode is part one of a two-part series on considerations for working with childhood bullying and mental health. This podcast is part of a suite of resources from Emerging Minds that focuses on child mental health and bullying. These resources can be found on the Emerging Minds website. If you’re interested in learning more for this two-part podcast, I’m joined by Dr Lesley-Anne Ey of the University of South Australia. Lesley works in education futures as a senior lecturer and researcher. In part one of this two-part series, we’ll be looking at the definition of bullying and how it can be understood differently by children and adults. We’ll discuss the effects of bullying behaviours on children’s mental health and the importance of early intervention. We’ll also look at the consequences of labelling children as bullies and victims, how practitioners might support a movement away from these categorisations and why this is important for children’s mental health.
So, Lesley, thanks for joining me. The term bullying is so universally known. I think when we hear it, we automatically think we know what it means, but I understand now there can be some really different definitions of bullying between adults and children and even between adults. Can you talk a little bit about the definition of bullying and where these differences in definition might occur?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (01:46): You would be surprised how many adults don’t really know how to define bullying. For a behaviour to be bullying, obviously, the foundation of bullying is aggression. Like it’s that aggressive behaviour, but for it to be bullying, it needs to be intentional. So there needs to be an intention to cause harm to other person. Now, whether that harm is physical harm, psychological harm, reputational harm, there is some sort of intent to cause harm. There’s also the power differentials. Now those power differentials can be height, intelligence, popularity, ethnicity, being part of a minority group. There’s all these different ways that there could, there could be that power differential, but there also is that power differential. And of course that repetition. And that is the one that’s really quite tricky when we are talking about bullying. So the repetition of bullying differs. If there’s severe bullying behaviours occurring and it might happen only twice before it is then identified as repetition.
There’s a pattern emerging. So we need that early intervention very, very quickly, but the repetition, I think some practitioners might see, that’s a once off or that only happens once every couple of months. Doesn’t matter, really. We need to look at every case as an individual case and have a look at how it’s impacting the child who is experiencing the bullying. If it’s igniting fear in them, if it’s impacting their mental health, if it’s impacting their daily routine, because they’re concerned that they’re going to experience bullying, we need to start acting on that immediately. So I think some of the confusion is what is repetition. So repetition, there is no clear cut answer for that. We can’t say that repetition is twice a week or repetition is once a month or repetition is every day. The repetition is based on if it has happened more than once, if it is impacting the child, who’s experiencing that behaviour, we do need to act upon that.
The intent to harm is another one, how you’re supposed to read someone’s mind to see whether they’re actually intending to harm, but you can explore that by looking at the power differentials, the individual context, what the relationship’s like, if one child is deliberately making another child feel uncomfortable, if that has been addressed by an adult or another caring person. And the instigator of the behaviour is aware that it has impacted the person who is experiencing the behaviour and they keep doing it, you can assume that there is some sort of intention there. And this is very unclear with adults as well as children, which is why it’s really important that we get educated, that we actually learn about the three elements of bullying, of power differentials, intent to harm, and repetition. And we explore that in our training so that we understand what that means. But we also understand that it’s based on individual context and individual situations as well.
Nicole Rollbusch (05:01): Mm. Bullying is such a complex behaviour. It’s really easy to see how it can be perceived in such different ways. What might the consequences be of these, I suppose, mismatches in understanding?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (05:16): I think if children don’t know or parents don’t know what defines bullying, they might dismiss or underestimate the behaviour, or they might overestimate the behaviour. So if there’s a once off incident and it might be a physical fight and you know, those kids might have had a physical fight the year before and an adult calls that bullying, you could have like inappropriate responses. If it’s underestimated, then there’s not going to be any interventions put in place. And these kids who have either underlying issues that need to be addressed, or the kids that have been experiencing bullying that are developing fear and withdrawal or depression or anxiety, they’re not going to be addressed either. So if we don’t have that clear understanding, we can’t address the problem at hand.
So it’s really important that practitioners have a clear understanding of bullying so they can work with parents, they can work with children, they can work with adolescents and explore those three elements and see exactly what’s happening for the child who is engaging in those behaviours. And also for the child who might be experiencing those behaviours, because that’s how you’re going to drill down to those underlying issues that have influencing those behaviours.
Nicole Rollbusch (06:32): So you’ve spoken about adults understandings of bullying behaviour, and about how these misunderstandings could lead to over/underestimating the behaviour. But what about children’s understandings?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (06:45): It’s really important to have children’s or young people’s voice and understand their perspectives in relation to bullying behaviours or experiencing bullying. You need to understand how they’re interpreting those behaviours. So for example, the child or young person who is engaging in those behaviours, they might not understand that those behaviours are actually harmful. They may think that they’re joking. They may be doing it to try and increase their popularity because other people are laughing and they may not understand what the implication it actually has for the child or young person who is experiencing those behaviours. They might be copying what they’ve learned at home in relation to how they address social issues or try to get their own way. So it’s important to understand how they see those behaviours, to be able to put strategies in place, to help reshape that behaviour.
As for children and young people here are experiencing those behaviours. You need to understand what is happening to them. How they are seeing those behaviours, how it’s impacting them in relation to their mental health or whether they’re developing other forms of illness because of that behaviour, whether it’s impacting their desire or confidence in attending school or attending football practise. So we need to understand how they are interpreting those behaviours.
Nicole Rollbusch (08:14): You mentioned bullying behaviours impacting children’s mental health. How exactly can bullying affect children’s mental wellbeing?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (08:23): That’s a really interesting question. I think bullying can impact children differently. It depends on their age, the severity of the bullying, whether they have any support networks around them. It depends on their individual characteristics, whether they’re largely resilient children. That bullying can impact children’s mental health, they can develop anxiety, particularly social anxiety. They will try to avoid the place or the setting where the bullying is occurring. Obviously, if you are feeling rejected, you don’t understand why you are being rejected. That’s a lot for kids to take on, regardless of whether they’re very young, whether they’re in their primary school years, or whether they’re adolescents, if you are being rejected for no apparent reason, that is very depressing. And it’s very isolating, which can put them into a slump of deep depression and feeling rejected can also lead to other forms of mental illness.
And of course, if children are, or young people are feeling really depressed, they lose their sense of self and sense of identity. And they can really get into a really dark place and can cause suicidal ideation where they’re not understanding, what’s my purpose? What do I bring to the world? How do I fit in with the world? If they’re feeling that way, it’s really quite taxing on their mental health.
Nicole Rollbusch (09:52): So they can be quite significant, the impacts, and they can be quite long lasting?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (09:57): Absolutely. If you are rejected, particularly when you’re going through that developing your identity stage and you don’t have strong friendship groups, how are you supposed to experiment with interacting with peers, with others, which can really impact how you interact with people when you’re older as well. And of course depression is… They don’t call it the black dog for nothing it’s, it can be really severe. So it’s really important that if we are aware that children are being impacted or being affected by bullying behaviour, that we intervene really early and we try and wrap them around with support services and supportive networks within their family environment and their school environment.
Nicole Rollbusch (10:47): What about children who engage in bullying behaviour, what might be happening for them?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (10:52): So children who engage in bullying behaviours, there’s usually some sort of influence that’s contributing to the development of those bullying behaviours. So it might be that they’re living in adversity. It might be that they are living with domestic violence, could be learned behaviour. It could be that they’re feeling sort of depressed or inadequate in some ways. So they’re trying to demonstrate their power in other ways, which is why they might engage in those bullying behaviours. So it’s important to actually support those children as well, trying to drill down into what is causing those behaviours so that you can then work with that child to support their sense of belonging and address some of their issues to then help them to address that behaviour. So without those early interventions to sort of address the issues that they’re dealing with, then of course, they’re going to go on to be vulnerable, to develop mental illness as well.
Nicole Rollbusch (11:50): So it’s really clearly important that we are thinking about and addressing the effects, not only for children who are experiencing bullying, but also for those who are engaging in these behaviours. And you mentioned the importance of early intervention, what difference can it make?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (12:06): I think the best way to address and respond to bullying is to try and prevent it. So I think education is key. Children need to understand what bullying is. They need to understand how it can impact others. I worked with some early childhood educators to help them to develop a anti-bullying curriculum, where they looked at some of the key concepts around what bullying is, what defines bullying as an action and educating children around the sort of bystander behaviour and how that can be very detrimental, but also the defender behaviour. So encouraging children to understand how their bullying can impact on their peers and help them to try and prevent that. So it’s a community approach for children to understand the impacts it can have and work together to try and prevent bullying. And if a child or a peer is being bullied, giving them strategies to help them to intervene. Because having those peers intervene can be really effective.
So I think it’s really key that we teach children about bullying really early on in their lives. So targeting early childhood lays that foundation to try and build children’s empathy and their understanding around bullying, which is then likely to flow over into their primary years and adolescent years.
Nicole Rollbusch (13:29): So if we start early, it really becomes an ingrained behaviour or understanding. I’m interested in knowing how you might teach young children about some of these concepts.
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (13:39): So when I was working with early childhood educators, one of the key things that we did to develop children’s understanding and empathy around bullying behaviours is we got an apple and we dropped the apple repeatedly, left it a couple of days and then peeled it. So you could see on the outside, the apple looks fine, but on the inside, once you peeled it, there’s all these bruises everywhere. So there’s all these underlying impacts that you may not be able to see, but it is actually impacting the person who is experiencing bullying. We also did to try and teach children about, you can’t take something back. Once you have said something or done something, that’s been done. Now, the other person has experienced that. And one of the ways that we taught them about that is getting a piece of paper and screwing it up into a ball and then trying to straighten it out.
Now you cannot straighten it out, it’s still impacted, the piece of paper. By screwing the piece of paper offer into a tight ball, you’re never, ever going to get that piece of paper straight again. So we taught them about, thinking about how bullying behaviour impacts others and how difficult it is to undo those impacts. And we taught them about defending each other, standing up for each other. So we gave them some strategies on how to do that. And we sort of brainstormed with the kids in relation to what could you do to distract someone who is engaging in bullying behaviours? What sort of things could you do? And they’re coming up with some great ideas. Like we could say, Hey, do you want to go kick the footy? And that’s something that it’s risk free for the child. So we are trying to teach them how they could be defenders in a way that’s risk free for them. So they didn’t feel scared to actually defend.
Nicole Rollbusch (15:29): I like that idea of using something simple, like an apple or a piece of paper to demonstrate these concepts and also getting kids involved in coming up with these safe solutions. How can these early intervention strategies help to change the mental health outcomes for children who experience or engage in bullying behaviour?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (15:49): I think for children who are engaging in that behaviour, early intervention is not only going to help address the issues that they’re actually dealing with that has contributed to them actually developing those behaviours, but also it’s going to support their lifelong outcomes. If you engage in bullying behaviour, people might do what you want them to do out of fear, but you’re not going to develop strong relationships and friendships that can be lifelong. If you are engaging in that type of behaviour, you don’t know how to interact competently with other people, which is going to impact your lifelong outcomes. So it’s that early intervention and helping these children to actually reshape their behaviours and understand their behaviours, understand why they’re engaging in those behaviours and address those issues is going to be a lot better for those children’s outcomes as they’re going through their early years, middle years, adolescent years, and adult years.
So as the children who are experiencing bullying behaviour that can have really detrimental outcomes on their mental health, on their physical health, on their ability to build trusting relationships, to allow themselves to trust others. So it can impact on their long-term relationships, whether it be romantic relationships or peer relationships or work relationships. If they don’t receive support relative to their mental health, if they are suffering depression or anxiety, it can lead into more severe impacts on their mental health. So early intervention is really important to be able to address the underlying issues. And for children who have been experiencing bullying, they need to actually feel a sense of confidence. So children who are experiencing bullying, they need to understand that being bullied doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with them. It’s not their fault. So we need to put strategies in place that build their confidence, that help them to understand that this isn’t my fault. There isn’t anything wrong with me.
Nicole Rollbusch (18:03): Yeah. It’s so important to support children, to move away from those feelings of self blame and something else that can really impact how children perceive themselves is labels like bullying victim. We’ve been using language like children who engage in bullying behaviours or children who are experiencing bullying behaviours. And there’s a good reason we are doing that. What might the consequences be of labelling children either is a bully or a victim?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (18:31): I think for children who are labelled bullies, they actually rise to the label. So if they are called a bully, often enough, they accept that label. And then they enact that label because they it’s an expectation that they’re going to engage in these behaviours. So I think that it’s dangerous to actually label a child a bully because it’s almost providing that expectation that that’s what they’re going to do. That’s how they’re going to act. So it’s not going to be of any great help in wanting to reshape those behaviours. So we need to stop using the term, your… Or stop labelling children as bullies and actually think about getting them to sort of reflect on their behaviour, ask them what they think they’re doing in relation to their behaviour, what their intentions are behind their behaviour. And do they understand the impact of their behaviour?
So labelling a child, a bully is almost condoning that behaviour because you are expecting that behaviour and they will step up and live up to that reputation if that’s what they have got, if that’s what they’re being addressed or labelled as a bully, they are going to accept that’s how people see them. And that label follows them through their school years or through their life. So they don’t have any, they don’t see the sense of even trying to change that behaviour. So I think that’s quite risky in relation to labelling a child of bullying. Conversely, labelling a child, a victim can develop a sense of learned helplessness. If they are labelled a victim, you are taking away their power and basically telling them there’s nothing they can do about it, that you are a victim. And a lot of people label somebody, a victim in attempt to try to support them and let them know that it’s not their fault.
But in doing that, you can also disempower them and actually make them feel like there’s nothing they can do about that. So instead we need to be working with that child and reiterating to them that, yeah, it’s not their fault, but the way they respond to that behaviour, the way they internalise that behaviour can support them to overcome that behaviour and help them to develop their confidence and help them to develop strategies to strengthen their mental health rather than actually sort of giving up and saying, okay, I’m a victim. There’s nothing I can do about this. This is not my fault, but I’m sort of stuck in this situation. There’s nothing I can do. So I think it’s really, it could be detrimental labelling a child, a bully or a victim. We need to be working with those kids to support them, help them to find strategies, to find out the underlying issues and to find out the impacts rather than actually fighting them with labels.
Nicole Rollbusch (21:35): So the labels almost seem like they simplify the experience and the effects?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (21:40): The labels do seem to simplify it because it clumps everybody into a particular label, rather than actually look at the individual experience of each child and have a look at what is influencing those behaviours. We really do need to drill down into the child’s life, their context, their interpretations, their behaviours, and what might be influencing those behaviours to be able to actually help that child. And now for the child who might be experiencing those behaviours again, we need to really drill down into what is happening and how that’s impacting them. Cause as I said earlier, you have some children that are quite resilient. They might have a very easy temperament. They might have really strong, supportive peer networks. They might have a really strong sense of self. So if they’re experiencing bullying behaviour, it may not impact them as much, but then you might have a child that’s really vulnerable that might have trauma in their life and this bullying or the experiencing bullying behaviour is really impacting them quite severely on top of what else they’re having to do with.
So by just labelling the behaviours, doesn’t provide good guidance relative to how to respond to those behaviours in a supportive way, that’s going to be beneficial to the child.
Nicole Rollbusch (23:00): How might practitioners be able to support a moving away from these types of labels and how would that help a child’s mental health outcomes?
Dr Lesley-Anne Ey (23:09): It’s important that practitioners focus on the actual behaviour and not label the child. They need to label the behaviour as sort of like aggressive behaviour and getting the child to actually think about their behaviour, how it might impact others, and also how it might impact themselves because not only can bullying behaviour impact others negatively as we’ve already discussed today, but it can also impact the child who is engaging in those behaviours. It is going to impact their relationships. They might have power for a period of time, but eventually as they go through life, that power is going to fade. They’re going to be less popular. They’re going to find it more difficult to network. They’re going to find it more difficult to develop relationships. They’re going to find it more difficult to be secure in those relationships. So that’s why it’s really important to intervene really early.
If children have insecurities that has contributed to them developing those behaviours, that’s what needs to be addressed really early on. So we need to think about the behaviour without labelling the child. We need to actually think about what the behaviour is and what we can do to actually reshape that behaviour. Now for the child who might be experiencing bullying behaviours, and it might be impacting them, we need to think about what those impacts are, what can be done to support or lessen those impacts to support overcoming those impacts. So we need to empower that child to take control in their life, to give a little bit of power back to them. And by labelling them a victim, that’s not going to be very helpful at all. So we need to move away from those labels and actually look at the behaviours or the impacts and strategies to be able to, I guess, lessen the impacts or reshape the behaviours, helping the child who has experienced the behaviour to understand that it’s not their fault, but also understanding how they can take control back in their life.
What strategies can be put in place to prevent them internalising what they’re experiencing to the degree that it’s going to be negative on their mental health or their development. And it may be changing environment that might actually be the answer. If a child is experiencing bullying behaviours in a particular school, for example, or a particular sports club, it might be the need to actually change environment and provide that fresh start and help them to sort of build their confidence and bring power back into their lives so that they don’t have those negative consequences or lifelong negative consequences either.
Nicole Rollbusch (25:56): Yeah. So really considering the child as an individual and their context, rather than applying that categorization or stereotype. It’s such a critical thing for us to remember how much can sit behind a label. Well, thanks very much, Lesley, for your insights on a very complex and important topic, we might leave it there for today.
Thanks to our listeners for joining us. We hope you’ll join us again for part two of our practice considerations for childhood bullying and mental health. Bye for now.
Narrator (26:28): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practise. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health led by Emerging Minds. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the national support for child or youth mental health program.