Early Risk Factors for Being a Bully, Victim, or Bully in Late Elementary

26 Nov. 2012 Early risk factors for being a bully, victim, or bully/victim in late elementary and early secondary education. The longitudinal TRAIL study By Danielle EMC Jansen, Rene Veenstra, Johan Ormel, Frank C Verhulst and Sijmen A Reijeveld This research discusses the influence of early risk factors on later involvement in bullying. In the beginning of the article, the authors mentioned that while bullying is a serious problem in school all over the world, the most researches on bullying focus on characteristics of children at the moment they already are involved in bullying.

Thus there are limited data regarding the impact of early risk factors in bullying. They examined the influence of preschool behaviors, family characteristics, and parental mental health on bullying and victimization. Their examination includes obtaining data of family characteristics, parental mental health and retrospectively on children’s preschool behavior with survey method. Then, they measured the schoolmate’s reports for involvement of adolescents in bullying or victimization at age 11 and 13. 5.

As the research conclusion, variety of aspects such as behavior in preschool, emotional problem, motor problem, socio-economic status, and family breakup, are linked to the involvement in bullying at a later age. The authors emphasize that focusing on risk groups in early age enhances prevention of bullying and its consequences. In this article, the authors are indicating the problem that bullying is a significant issue all over the world, and that there are only limited evidence that associate features of children background before they were involved in bullying.

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As a solution to this problem, the authors wanted to seek the risk factors; especially before children begin social relationship. They designed their research to examine the impact of the children’s background during the preschool age on bullying at the early teen age. The study subjects’ family characteristics include parental mental health, and preschool behavioral, emotional problem and motor problem. I believe this research design is appropriate for the solution of the problem. The ethods of sampling they use were survey and peer nomination from schoolmates; survey is to measure children’s background in preschool hood, peer nomination is to measure involvements in bullying as being bully, bully/victim, or victim. I assume that the sampling methods are appropriate because there are limited contaminations such as experimenter’s bias or base rate problems. The possible confounding variables are gender, diagnoses of development disorders, stress level, and history of heredity mental disease through family. When measuring the behavior, the gender is always the possible confounding variable.

Boys and Girls have different preferences of toys, ways of playing, and tension level. The diagnoses of development disorders such as ADD or ADHD are major confounding variables for the measuring children’s behavior as well. The main limitation of the data collection was that they used retrospective reports of preschool behavior. As a result, parental report may have been affected by inaccuracies in their memory. Other than that, I could say that the data gathering method is reliable and also valuable because the results were based on facts.

As a result of their research, preschool children with aggressiveness were more likely to be a bully, bully/victim, and victim. Preschool children with good motor skill were more likely to be bully and less likely to be victim. Children from low socioeconomic status families were more likely to be bully, bully/victim, and victim. Children from intact two parent families were more likely to be uninvolved in bullying. After considering the entire research outcomes, the authors concluded that certain aspects from children in preschool are related to involvement in bullying at a later age.

Thus I could say that the evidence substantiated this conclusion. Focusing on risk at an early age can enhance the prevention of bullying. The research results are very interesting and informative. It helped me as a parent, to realize the importance of preschool social and environmental factors of bullying at later ages. I chose this article for the discussion on this short paper because I am interested in parenting techniques. The way to raise children without involvement of bullying, neither being a bully nor a victim.

I do not want my children to get involved with any fears or sadness in school caused by bullying. I believe many often parents feel the same way. I have never experienced any aspect of bullying during my early school age. However I have heard of many stories about bullying in our school and resulted in psychological trauma or injury. I believe that being strong physically and emotionally are very important to escape from bullies. Joining sports clubs is one of the great ways to become stronger physically and emotionally.

My four year old son, has recently has joined a flag football team. Being a member of this team will help him obtain the physical ability and emotional development. After he learned how to efficiently run faster and move quickly, he achieved well during the games. When he did well during games, he was encouraged by positive feedbacks from adults. The positive feedback from adults is powerful tools that will help him build up confidence. Another great aspect of being a part of sports team is the opportunity to gain social skill such as fairness, care, respect, and responsibility.

Being a fair and trustworthy player is very important for sportsmanship. Coaches and older players are always encouraging children to be fair and trustworthy. Practicing with the same teammates two to three times a week helps children to build a powerful trust and make great relationship with their teammates. Children can learn many lessons from small societies like a sports team to prepare for their real life. Another thing that I learned from this research article is the importance of family environment.

I realize that children are very sensitive to their family characteristics and affected easily from negative family factors such as fighting among parents and family break ups. I remembered the time when I was a child, I hated when my mother and father were arguing in front of me. I was sad and unhappy hearing their fighting voices. Thus I can easily imagine how sad to be in the middle of parental conflict in their childhood. To provide the environment without anxiety from parental conflicts, mental issues or family break up is very important for make a strong and mentally stable person.

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