OUR VIEW: Teach kids not to bully others

    Bullying has never been good, but it has been around since biblical times and probably as long as mankind has lived on Earth.
    Why we keep doing it boggles the mind, because it only fosters hate and derision that benefits no one, yet it continues. Worst of all, it’s far too common among young people.
    Bullying has a strong link to suicide, which is the third-leading cause of death among young people, resulting in 4,400 deaths per year, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control. And for every suicide among young people, there are at least 100 suicide attempts.
    More than 14 percent of high school students have considered suicide, and almost 7 percent have attempted it. Bully victims are up to nine times more likely to consider suicide than non-victims, according to studies by Yale University.
    So why do we continue this cycle of hatred and death?
    Back in the day, you at least had to talk to another human to bully someone, and most of the time you said it right to someone’s face. Sometimes these things were settled in the schoolyard, often followed by a handshake and enemies becoming friends.
    Sure, we have conflict – we wouldn’t be human without it. However, it seems like we had better ways to settle it in previous generations.
    Today we have social media bullying, the most cowardly kind of all. People hind behind a piece of glass in their pockets
and try to ruin people’s lives from a
keyboard.
    Our school system has worked hard to help prevent these incidents, but they will not stop until parents take accountability and raise their kids to treat others with respect – even those you disagree with. We have to be able to talk with our children about making this a world everyone can peacefully live in, rather than trying to put someone on blast for teenage transgressions, be they real or fictional.
    You can’t tell a high school student that their current problems are dumb, and they won’t even care about them once they start their adult lives. That’s the one part of parental wisdom that never seems to stick with the youngsters until they realize it for themselves.
    Our kids need us to protect them from this kind of behavior. More importantly, we need to teach them to protect each other and treat others the way they want to be treated.