Teaching my kids to be offensive to School Bullies

The last time I wrote about my twins being bullied in preschool, a website "Coffee Grounds", primarily discussing about school bullies, picked up my story to relate to his readers. I find that interesting as finally some parents congregate to share and hopefully seek some practical solutions in a common issue that they faced with their young kids.

Perhaps as a first time parent, it amazes me that school bullying could occur at such a young age (my twins were only about three years old when the incident happened). At that time, I was thinking hard if my parenting skills could have gone "hay wired" in anyway? Maybe as parents, we could have entrenched such a strong mindset of good behaviour in our kids that when school bullying occurs, the kids did not know how to deal or react to it.

So recently, my husband and I decided to teach our twins to be on the mildly offensive side to their school bullies should any incident happen again.

"If Jarren beat you again, tell him to stop it, and quickly tell your teacher about it." We role play in front of them a few times. I noticed that my twin son brightened up immediately as if he was armed with a "new weapon". We got both twins to role play with us until they are both confident about saying,"Stop it, stop beating me .....I'll go and tell Teacher Michelle now...".

A week after the role play, my twin son told me cheerfully that he had fend off one of his friend who tried to beat him. I praised him for being brave. He definitely feels more confident in preschool now. It is a stark contrast in comparison to his worried face every morning when I brought him to preschool previously.