Supporting Your Child Through Toxic Relationships and Bullying

In my work as a professional coach, I am often called upon by parents in extremis to help them advocate for and safeguard their child where bullying, teasing, excluding, or controlling behaviour is at stake.

What I bring to both my coaching and my training work in schools – is my experience, from the inside out, of school life.

If you’re observing some dynamics in your child’s social scene at school that get your momma / poppa bear spider-senses tingling, and want some inside-track thinking on what works well, and what doesn’t, then you may be interested to read my comprehensive guide on Bullying and Toxic Relationships in School, which you can access here.

What follows is an excerpt from that guide, focused on how you can support your child through these kinds of difficulties.

Listen carefully, ask lots of open and reflective questions. Manage your reactions. Avoid over-reacting or layering on extra drama. Validate their experience. Acknowledge and appreciate that they have been having a hard time. Praise any points of bravery or resistance – even if that hasn’t been overt in any push-back against the other child or children’s behaviour. Notice where they are showing a good sense of important values – eg fairness, kindness, injustice, inclusivity, appreciation.
Despite what they are suffering, help them to reconnect with their strengths. Being on the receiving end of bullying and controlling behaviour makes any of us feel helpless, disempowered. There’s often very deliberate power-play at stake, and we want to help our child connect with their power.
Stay in listening mode. Be open and receptive and curious around what they said and didn’t say, what they did, or didn’t do – ask about the feelings and thinking around that. Don’t react with judgment about things they may have done that you feel were mistakes. Chances are they are probably already blaming themselves and second-guessing…Identify the skills and needs that are at stake so that you can work on helping them with those.
You want to help them feel good about entrusting you with this. You want them to be able to come back to you in the future with similar, potentially more serious stuff in the future. So give them credit, praise their judgment, show your support and appreciation for them coming to you with their problem, and let them know that you will do what you can to help them work things out.
Avoid minimising their complaints, or silver-lining what’s happening. Similarly don’t pathologise the perpetrators. This erodes a sense of hope, and makes it harder for a reconciliation to take place. Or if it does then there is a sense you won’t approve. Be ‘on side’ without taking sides too heavily.
Normalise the experience – that’s not to say everyone goes though what they are experiencing – but being excluded, or being targeted, especially if it’s become an established pattern makes our kids feel like there is something wrong with them.
Reframe it as a challenge that is part of a growing experience that most people experience at some point. It’s an event in time, or a series of events in time, that they will be able to get through, especially now they have made the wise move of talking about it to help keep it in proportion and get help.
Double down on making home their safe harbour – as Kim John Payne puts it in his book, Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens, where they can have a refuge from the stress they are experiencing with peers. This means decluttering the extras and allowing more time for them to rest and recover – to quite literally ‘recreate’. This means dialling up our availability to connect- but not only about the problem. Don’t let the situation with peers become all-consuming or the main way in which you connect with them. Make sure you are also able to enrich family life with some fun and playful times away from it all. Help open them up to new and different experiences – eg away from screens ESPECIALLY if they are on social media. Enrich your connection and allow space and time for you to be in coaching mode to build up their strength and skills.
Concentrate on putting the majority of your efforts on the aspects of the situation you have the most control over – your homelife, your relationship with your child, sharing values and teaching skills of boundary setting, minimising the impact of boundaries being encroached on, and productive ways of being on their own side. You can’t make the teachers more effective than they are capable of being. You can’t make other kids nice to your child, and neither can your kid.
Concentrate on dialling up likeability skills (Mitch Prinstein – ‘The Popularity Illusion’): listening, appreciating, including, incorporating ideas, reading the room.

I would also like to recommend the book, written by Kim John Payne and Luis Ferdinando Llosa called ‘Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens.’ Which provides expanded guidance for parents, plus some really resonant case studies and conversation starters for parents to use side by side with their children when working through hard times.

This approach both helps contextualise what your child may be experiencing, and make it easier for him or her to see boundary breaches in what’s going on more clearly through the lens of what’s happening in the case study.

Kim John Payne also has serialised one of those case studies ‘Sophie’s Story’ on ‘The Simplicity Parenting Podcast’ – which provides insightful bitesized advice.

I hope these ideas and resources provide some help in one of the more challenging aspects of bearing witness to and supporting our children in their social and emotional growth.

Emma Gleadhill is an Educational Speaker, Trainer and Coach specialising in bringing the science of thriving to schools, families, and workplaces. She works with over 70 schools throughout the UK and internationally. She also works with corporate wellbeing and parent and carer groups in numerous national and international organisations delivering transformative learning in psychological wellbeing, emotional intelligence, and healthy relationships.

www.emmagleadhill.com

contact@emmagleadhill.com

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