If you google cyberbullying, you’ll find page after page of articles advising parents on how to best protect their kids from cyberbullying and bullies. Almost all of them wax eloquent about the importance of open, honest communication with kids. There is plenty of common advice on how to recognise bullying, not give in to peer pressure, and understand – deeply – that nothing ever dies once it’s in cyberspace.
After all, even innocuous things can take on a life of their own and digital footprints from a lifetime ago can come back to haunt the child in adulthood long after they’ve outgrown the beliefs their younger selves swore by what children must never, ever share online, no matter how strong the temptation to be cool and, of course, sounding alarm bells to trusted adults who will address the problem without judgment or victim-blaming.
All of this is good advice.
As a technologist, I have a lot of empathy for those of us trying to raise children in the age of unfettered access to the internet and deep fakes so good they can blur the boundaries between what’s real and manufactured even for the most discerning eye, let alone vulnerable.
As a father and an educationist, I feel helpless rage, profound sadness, and, admittedly, a lot of fear every time I read about ‘trends’ like sextortion (extorting sexually coloured, explicit content in the form of writing, photos, or videos by threatening to reveal embarrassing information about someone online) among teens.
It’s hard to imagine that the very AI we’re using to make education a level playing field for kids around the world is being used to target the very kids we’re trying to help. But here we are.
As important as it is to educate kids sufficiently to prevent them from being cyberbullied, I think we’re missing one crucial piece in the online safety jigsaw puzzle: Are we doing enough to ensure our kids don’t become the bullies that other kids need to be protected from?
It’s an uncomfortable, jarring thought. Every parent tries (as far as possible) to model kindness, compassion, and social responsibility for our kids. We worry endlessly about our children’s moral centre and value system and guilt ourselves to death for every misstep. No one wants to think – let alone see – their kid as someone so dangerous that other kids need active protection from them.
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And yet, if UNICEF research is telling us that about 30 per cent of teens and tweens across 30 countries have been bullied online, 20 per cent have even skipped school due to it, and 80 per cent of children in 25 countries have at some point have felt that they are in danger of online sexual abuse or exploitation, someone must be on the sender’s side of those missives of online terror, right?
As someone who interacts with children as young as six all the way up to almost-adulthood, there’s one thing I want all parents to know: Although it might often seem like it by the constant need to compete and keep up due to the incessant noise on social media, Dear Parents, your children are not your personal report cards.
And here’s another: Being a cyberbully does not make a child awful or irredeemable, inherently. It just makes them someone who made a mistake and needs help course-correcting.
In an ideal world, our kids would learn and model their behaviour only on that which we want them to learn and retain. They’d be able to filter out all the harmful noise around them and have our sense of right and wrong encoded in them like it’s part of our shared DNA.
But that’s an unrealistic expectation to have. We know that the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that controls impulsiveness and decision-making. We also know that it is one of the last parts of the brain to develop, and the process of development continues well into adulthood. It’s largely the reason teenagers behave erratically, because the emotional centre of their brain is maturing faster than the reasoning part.
As someone who also interacts with parents day in and day out, I can’t tell you the number of times I see parents personalising even the idea of ‘failure’ in their children. Almost like it’s an indictment of their upbringing.
It’s good to assume responsibility for your children’s actions – as parents, we are, after all, their foremost teachers. But it’s wrong to turn this responsibility into a burden that doesn’t allow kids the space to make mistakes and learn from them.
I see this all the time: Warning signs that could have been caught – should have been caught – get ignored because we don’t want to see our child having failed at being ‘good’, which, by extension means we have failed at being good parents as well.
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I can also tell you this: Once we’re able to reframe the narrative around our kids’ mistakes, it becomes so much easier to prevent them.
An unspoken rule at BrightCHAMPS, across all our countries and verticals, is to ensure that our students and their parents or other primary caregivers are socialised in how to avoid bullying, both as the receiver and the perpetrator.
Oddly, not being a bully requires a lot of the same kind of work and educating that not being bullied does:
- How to recognise bullying: Many bullies don’t know they’re being bullies because when you’re young and impetuous it’s hard to discern the balance of power and the difference between banter/joking and picking on someone. It’s hard for kids to understand how their words are affecting the person receiving them. So recognising bullying needs to be a conversation not just from the POV of how you feel when you hear someone say something nasty to you, but also practising active compassion on how your words are impacting the ones you’re saying them to.
- Not giving in to peer pressure: In addition to what I said above, I’ve seen that sometimes bullying happens not due to personal dislike for the child being bullied, because it’s easier to fall in line with the popular kids than do/say things that could make you their target. Being a teen is hard, being a teen making waves and challenging what’s popular is harder. In my experience what works and is practical is to create avenues for kids to alert adults without being caught in the crosshairs or becoming a “hero”. Most kids are terrified of the tide of popularity turning against them.
- Making mistakes and taking responsibility for them: This is the hardest part – letting kids know that at the end of the day, cyberbullying is a mistake that can be corrected, while doing everything we can to ensure that our kids don’t actually make them. How do we tell them that they will be loved, accepted, helped, and not judged even if they do end up faltering while also teaching them the gravity of making this mistake? It’s a constant conversation, and one that is successful only when kids believe that they will not be instantly branded as bad, evil, or problematic the instant someone ‘finds out’. Mistakes become crimes when they keep trying to cover it up with escalating acts of cover-up to prevent being ‘caught’. Missteps become permanent personality traits when children fear rejection.
To sum up, I can only say that there is no silver bullet cure to the problem of cyberbullying. And with more sophisticated tech tools that can become a nuisance for all of us parents when the right tools meet the wrong intent, the reality is that cyberbullying isn’t going anywhere.
Our best hope is acknowledging that there are two sides to every problem and that sometimes our kids might find themselves on the creator’s side instead of the victim’s side. And have a plan on how to walk them back from this dangerous ledge.
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