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Giving Them a Fighting Chance
A while back I asked if anyone could explain the increased incidence of bullying in schools. As no one has responded, I am putting forward my own hypothesis.
Roy Baumeister is a professor of psychology at Florida State University. Back in the early seventies when he was an undergrad at Princeton, Dr. Baumeister became interested in the concept of self-esteem. At that time, the term was almost unknown; certainly no one considered self-esteem important or worth bolstering. Dr. Baumeister hypothesized that high self-esteem would lead to improvement in many personal and social problems and, perhaps partly because of his efforts, by the mid-eighties a lot of people had jumped on his bandwagon, working hard to boost children’s self-esteem.
Ironically, it was around that time that it began to dawn on Dr. Baumeister that a growing body of research was indicating that the new emphasis on self-esteem wasn’t producing any positive outcomes. By the ninties, many researchers had come to think that the promotion of self-esteem was actually associated with some negative outcomes, especially a tendency to bullying and violence. Although people used to think that bullies acted the way they did because they suffered from low esteem, the truth turned out to be exactly the opposite. Actually, people with artificially-high self-esteem tend to have trouble coping with anything that threatens their good opinion of themselves, causing them to lash out angrily.
This new understanding of the effect of self-esteem that is out of proportion to accomplishment may offer some insights into the bullying phenomenon in schools. Perhaps the campaign to boost kids’ self-esteem has created an unusually-high percentage of little emperors who are prone to anger and aggression.
The last word goes to Dr. Baumeister. “After all these years, my recommendation is this: Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline. Recent work suggests this would be good for the individual and good for society - and might even be able to fill some of those promises that self-esteem once made but could not keep.”
Update to this post: SQE was quoted in the York Region news on August 3, 2010 in this article Region Parents Worry About Anti-bullying Watchdogs.
I agree that this may also be part of the problem, but children are also not dealt with when they do bully—I’ve heard and read many times that when a victim tells a teacher, that nothing is done. In schools today, there seems to be very little dicipline, and no consequences for good or bad behaviour. Kids run wild nowadays ‘Lord of the Flies’.