Stop whining about it. Give your kid a stable and warm family environment that always accepts him, tell him there are such things as "jerks" and "idiots," and teach him how to scoff. I would think that would take care of 80% of the problems, even though it's not the emotional therapeutic way favored by the types that inhabit Long Island:
Middle schoolers say meanness pervades their world. In a survey released last month by Child Abuse Protection Services, a nonprofit group based in Roslyn that creates student-targeted programs to combat abuse, bullying and peer harassment, 83 percent of sixth and seventh graders on [Long] Island said their schools had a bullying problem, and 45 percent said it was significant or severe. In the survey, 3 out of 10 students over all, including 1 in 4 girls, said they had bullied someone themselves.
"Bullying today is less about children hitting each other than it is about children being victimized by a culture of meanness," said Alane Fagin, executive director of the organization. "Children understand what many adults seem to have forgotten: You don't have to get hit to get hurt."
And the Internet is making matters a great deal worse, parents and experts say, because it provides a cloak of anonymity and removes physical size and bravery from the equation. Children as young as 7 or 8, who would never have dared to belittle or confront a classmate face to face, are empowered to be vulgar and vengeful at the keyboard.
