Recently I noticed some troubling signs coming from my twelve year old son. For one thing he was becoming very negative in his opinions. All he could talk about was monsters, killing, world take over and such. These seem to be related to the excessive amount of time he and his friends have been spending playing video games. Another sign that bothered me was how desperate he and his friends were about playing. No matter how much they played, it was never enough. They just could not be satisfied. In hindsight it seems as if they were all a little too dependant on each other.
Soon there after an incident occurred that helped me uncover the mystery. I walked out into my driveway and found chalk writing all over the place. It amounted to a few messages designed to hurt my son. It seems that the night before a couple of the older boys held down my son and shot off cap guns in his ears. He in turn retaliated by throwing things at them, which soon escalated into egging each others yards and so on. The last word was the writing on my driveway the next morning. It seems that my son had fallen into the "BULLY TRAP". A couple of days later the same older boy roped my son around the neck while he was coming home from school and placed a nasty burn mark on his neck. This time he got hurt.
Bullies circulate around our kids all the time. When a child is subjected to bullying they seek relief by bullying others. Let me explain where all this comes from. At the top of the bullying chain is the bullying parent. This is the parent that likes to push around their kids, probably their whole family. These kids filter into the neighborhood and spread this illness among other kids by using the very same tactics learned from their despicable parent. Recent statistics show that about one in four kids get bullied every day making this a fairly widespread problem.
The result of all this bulling is a less confident child with a fairly hopeless outlook on their future happiness. I have a wonderful cure for this problem that I will share with you in next weeks article.