Bullying Redux

Bullying receives a lot of press, especially schools adopt anti-bullying programs and states pass anti-bullying laws. Witnessing school shootings that were, in part, retaliation for relentless bullying may have increased our empathy toward both bullies and their targets, as well as our motivation to change. But tragic events, additions to curricula, and press coverage have all made it seem as if bullying is new. It might surprise you to learn that camping professionals have been taking a systematic, proactive role in preventing bullying since the 1929.  That year marked the publication of Camping and Character: A Camp Experiment in Character Education.

In Camping and Character, authors Hedley Dimock and Charles Hendry reported on the results of a multiyear study conducted at Camp Ahmek in Ontario. The study sought to uncover the changes evidenced in campers’ behavior during six weeks at camp, and to understand the mechanisms behind those changes. Among the more than 50 behaviors the authors tracked was bullying. Dimock and Hendry recognized that even small increases in bullying behavior needed to be addressed by the camp leadership. They were also encouraged by huge increases in many prosocial behaviors in youngsters. My favorite is: “Making friendly approach to [an] unlikable boy.”

Nearly 80 years later, what are the most important things we’ve learned about bullying? The answer has four parts. First, bullying itself is only half the picture. For every bully, there is at least one target. Second, bullying is cyclic. A recent study by the Center for Disease Control confirmed that about three quarters of bullies are also targets and about three quarters of targets turn around to bully another child. Third, bullying is social. Antisocial, to be sure, but it represents a dynamic, complex, interaction whose origins lie in unhealthy relationships.   Therefore, the solutions lie not in simple punishment, but in the formation of healthy relationships. And finally, there are often bystanders; onlookers who have the power to say something. “Hey, that’s not cool” or “Dude” or “Lay off” or “C’mon” are examples of benign-sounding comments that have the power to derail nascent bullying.

Camps are uniquely suited to deal with bullying because they are such healthy social environments. At camp, leaders supervise children and have opportunities to educate bullies and targets. Leaders can teach the kinds of prosocial behaviors Dimock, Hendry, and their pioneering predecessors saw so often at camps. This is easier to do than most people think, partly because bullying is so often a misguided attempt to make a social connection. If you can teach a bully how to make a social connection without using coercion, threats, or violence, you have actually met that child’s needs instead of simply punishing his or her misbehavior.

Specifically, camps help children in the following ways:

• By having the camp staff set a sterling interpersonal example for all children to follow.

• By seeing beyond the bully alone and including his or her target, plus any bystanders, in an intervention.

• By strengthening bullies’ fragile sense of themselves by providing opportunities for authentic achievement and human connection in various athletic or artistic domains.

• By teaching bullies to make social connections through healthy interaction. We all want to belong to a group…it’s just the bullies go about it in antisocial ways.

• By teaching targets to stand up to bullies in ways that makes bullying unrewarding.

• By setting, early and often in the camp session, strict guidelines for kindness and generosity…and then heaping on the praise when staff witness prosocial behaviors.

• By providing the kind of close supervision that allows both bullies and targets to replay unacceptable or unassertive interactions under the guidance of experienced adult staff.

• By deliberately creating a culture of caring that is perhaps different from school or the neighborhood at home…and then immersing children in that culture.

• By allowing positive peer pressure to exert itself such that children feel appreciated and rewarded for gentleness, honesty, kindness, and unselfishness.

Camps are not a bullying panacea. Outside of camp, there are powerful forces, such as violent media, that infuse children with the notion that violent, even lethal solutions to vexing social problems are both effective and glorious. Nevertheless, camp is a powerful, positive force for change.  Educating bullies, targets, and bystanders is just one of the many ways camp enriches lives and changes the world.

So next time you’re talking with a parent about how your camp handles bullying, provide a better answer than “We don’t tolerate bullying.” Instead, explain how your staff is trained to help children make friends. That is the single best way to prevent antisocial behavior. Give everyone a sense of belonging.

Then, explain how you use a combination of pre-season online training and in-person on-site training to train your staff to spot bullying, teach prosocial behaviors, encourage bystanders to be “upstanders,” and give opportunities for bullies to make amends.  One of the best online training options is ExpertOnlineTraining.com which includes a library of video training modules that I created for summer camp staff and youth development professionals.

There will always be some kinds of egregious misbehaviors that require expulsion from camp, but most instances of bullying are below this safety threshold. Showcase the strength of your camp by outlining how well prepared your staff is to prevent bullying and respond thoughtfully when it occurs.

Take the Pizza Test – There's Just No Limit to Kindness

The tastiest mouthful of any pizza is the first bite of the first slice. You’re hungry. You’ve been anticipating that mouthwatering goodness for an hour or more. Your taste buds are eager and alive. All this perfect pre-pizza preparation transforms ordinary melted mozzarella and pedestrian pepperoni into a sumptuous symphony of gustatory glory.

Ok, it’s not exactly the 4th of July in your mouth, but that first bite of a well-made pizza is pretty tasty. What’s wrong with a little hyperbole when you’re talking about happiness, right? Nothing, really, except that pleasures are short-lived. And they have a satiety point. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. Therein lies the value in distinguishing between what positive psychologists call “pleasures” and “gratifications.”

As we all know, the yumminess quotient for pizza (a pleasure) begins to diminish after that first slice. You may help yourself to another couple slices, but if someone forced you to keep eating, even the hungriest among us would eventually experience eating pizza as aversive. Indeed, if you were forced to woof down several large pizzas, you’d eventually throw it all up. There’s an image we could all do without. But it’s a powerful reminder of the limits to pleasure.

Gratifications, on the other hand, never turn the corner from enjoyable to excruciating. If you hold the door open for someone who is carrying an armload of books, your act of kindness feels good. If another person needs a hand a few minutes later, your unselfish assistance feels just as good. At no point would you say—to that 10th person who needed help—“I’m sorry. I’ve done so many acts of kindness today that I feel nauseated. I’m literally sick of helping.” Holding the door for someone is therefore quite different from eating pizza. There is no satiety point for gratifications, such as unselfish behavior.

What do we do now, armed with a new understanding between pleasure and gratification? According to research, both make contributions to happiness. But because gratifications have no satiety point, they make more reliable contributions to our well-being and the well-being of others than do pleasures. No surprise there. What might surprise you is what research suggests is the most powerful form of gratification: Tapping into one of your signature strengths in service to others.

Here are the 24 character strengths that exist across cultures:

Curiosity             Love of Learning            Critical Thinking

Ingenuity            Social  Intelligence         Perspective

Bravery              Diligence                        Honesty

Kindness            Loving/Be Loved            Enthusiasm

Citizenship          Fairness                         Leadership

Self-control         Prudence                       Humility

Hope                  Gratitude                        Forgiveness

Spirituality           Playfullness                   Appreciation of Beauty

Take a minute to scan this list and discover which two or three character strengths jump out as most characteristic of you. Then ask yourself, What are some things I do each week to exercise this strength? And an even more powerful query, How do I use this character strength in service to others? For example, you might say that bravery is a character strength and that when you teach your lifeguarding class, you model bravery and encourage bravery in others.

Lost in our consumer culture is the recipe for authentic happiness. That’s nothing new, of course. Socrates said, “He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.” More recently, Henry David Thoreau said, “It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.” And in a prescient statement about the evanescence of pleasures, Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Possessions are usually diminished by possession.”

To most youth leaders—especially camp professionals—these aphorisms are intuitive. We enjoy living simply, in nature, as much as possible. But few youth leaders know the way out of the materialism maze. Now you do. It’s free and it feels good. (How many things can you say that about?)

Make the commitment to spend some time with the list of character strengths above and do a little soul-searching to answer the question about the precise ways you tap into your particular strengths in service to others. It’s not only a recipe for authentic happiness, but also a path toward global social advancement. And if you enjoy munching on a slice of pizza while you contemplate saving the world, you’ve passed the test.

Finding Beauty in an Ashtray

“What is it?” asked my cabin leader, gently. We both eyed my clay creation as it emerged from the camp kiln, glazed and cooled. I was 12, so I hadn’t made a something; I’d made an anything. It had just been fun to pinch and push the clay for our hour-long arts and crafts period. Now came the hard part: I needed to identify my project.

“Hmm…” I thought out loud.

Finally, my cabin leader said confidently, “Oh, I see. It’s an ashtray.”

And there it was. The year was 1980, so it was still permissible to make an ashtray. Today, the same object would clearly be a politically correct candy dish or a heart-healthy, hypoallergenic soy nut dish. In any case, it was what it was and there it was. Like most arts-and-crafts projects at camp, it was, more than anything else, an expressive snapshot of my thoughts, feelings, and actions at the time of creation. It was simple and personal. Which is probably why it still sits (sans ashes) on my mother’s writing desk.

Volumes are written about what makes art art and what differentiates art from craft, so instead of writing an essay on aesthetics, I just want to share why I think arts and crafts at camp are so meaningful. In my mind, anything creative and pleasing to the senses can be art. Crafts, on the other hand, are construction skills, often learned through apprenticeship. Naturally, arts and crafts go hand-in-hand. Michelangelo used the craft of stone carving to create pieces of art like David. At camp, children learn crafts such as weaving and woodworking to create pieces of art such as baskets and birdhouses. To what end?

Contemporary conceptualizations of the human mind include the idea of multiple intelligences. (Interested readers can find books by Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg.) Simply put, we have different domains of cognitive strength—such as mathematical, social, verbal, artistic—and those domains compliment each other. So combining some athletic and social activities at camp with some arts-and-crafts actually feeds kids’ brains. It’s kind of like intellectual cross-training. The trouble with some camp arts-and-crafts programs is they are either marginalized or mechanized.

Marginalization occurs when the leadership at camp fails to create an atmosphere where art is valued. Arts-and-crafts becomes an “uncool” program activity and few campers attend the lame periods that are offered. The campers who do participate are labeled in ways that suggest they must not be athletic, adventuresome, or heterosexual.

Mechanization occurs when the leadership at camp relies on kits rather than creativity. Arts-and-crafts devolves into campers purchasing nearly-assembled moccasins, birdhouses, wallets, etc. The activity periods—if you want to call them that—involve very little activity besides counselors explaining to kids how to interpret the kit’s assembly directions. Creative juices dry up along with the seed for self-esteem: a genuine sense of accomplishment.

At the best camps, arts-and-crafts programs flourish because the leadership recognizes the value of a balanced program of activities—something that includes athletics, adventure, and art. Equally important, these programs flourish because campers are challenged to refine their crafty skills, solve problems, and create new works. The brains and souls of these children are nourished and the camp staff become actively involved in their mission: to nurture positive youth development. And as an added bonus, some lucky parents and grandparents may get an ashtray—I mean paperweight—on closing day.