Catherine's blog: Bullying...

Bullying has arrived at our door. And I have to admit that it caught us off guard which meant a delayed reaction from us too. At this stage I could probably write a book about the misconceptions of bullying!

Some of the false assumptions we were under:

1. Our son is 7, so we had not thought that at this age being mean to each other would be anything more than snatching a pencil.

2. Our son is at least head and shoulders above the rest of his class so I had always thought only the very very bravest of souls would take him on!

3. The 'perpetrator' was a little girl in his class and as it's a small school everyone knows pretty much everyone else; I know and very much like the girl and her family, so I was struggling to see it happening.

It was also the first year of the new SATs for year 2 and we believed that the increase in melt downs we were seeing were as a result of the stress this brought on. (Definitely another blog to be had on the dreaded SATs topic!)

Our son started to have lots of tantrums and while all children are prone to this for sure, he would end up yelling at us or worse hitting himself on the head as a result of some very minor issue. It never took much to upset him and then he would start shouting how useless he was at everything (this is where we were thought the SATs  were the cause as they were being constantly tested this year).

To add to the mix, we had a change in childcare early this year and this really weighed on our minds - it's never an easy transition to go from someone that the children loved dearly to a complete new minder, whom they love dearly now also, but there is still a significant transition to be made and so had this impacted him more than we realised or considered?

It was very upsetting to hear and see such a previously happy child show such confidence-shattering behaviours and clearly struggling with stress of some kind.

When we could get him to open up he started to tell us that the girl in class would frequently tell him how useless he was at school work and unfortunately they were also often paired together at sports where the same comments were being repeated. It was easy then to see how this could affect someone so young.

In truth it was probably a combination of all of the events this year that had played some part.

But we made an appointment at the school.  The conversation was thankfully very easy and although they hadn't noticed anything between the children in the classroom or playground, they acted very swiftly to ensure that the pairings didn't happen between them again. I am glad to say the change and return of our happy little boy was thankfully also swift!

It was our first experience with dealing with bullying but may not be our last. We have definitely learned a lot from the experience - speak to the school immediately being the number one, but also we have become a little more aware of changes in behaviours that can be small but still possible signs of something being wrong.  I hope that our son has learned that speaking to us and speaking out about it was the best thing he could do and while he is still young yet I hope he keeps that thought with him with him as he goes through life.

Catherine work 4 days a week for a financial institution in the City and is the mother of two boys.