Childhood Bullying and Teasing: What School Personnel, Other Professionals, and Parents Can Do.

Ross challenges the popular notion that bullying and teasing are unavoidable, insignificant childhood problems or character-building rites of passage. Instead, she argues that bullying and teasing are deeply painful, creating long-lasting harmful effects for perpetrators and bystanders as well as victims, and that these behaviors can be controlled through the concerted efforts of parents, professionals and children.

Ross places bullying and teasing within the context of a stress and coping theory that takes into account an individual's perception of a situation as well as that person's resources and environmental supports for coping with stress. "Nothing is harmless," Ross asserts, "if the child believes it to be a threat and feels his or her resources to be inadequate." The author cites abundant evidence that children's perceptions of stresses differ from those of adults: one particularly poignant example is her own 1980 study in which children with leukemia identified teasing about their appearance as their worst pain.

Only after accepting, rather than discounting, the child's appraisal of the situation, Ross argues, can adults help the child develop resources for coping more effectively and, where necessary, work toward reducing or controlling threats. This book provides concrete suggestions for each of these helping strategies. Teachers or other adults who want to empower a particular victim of teasing might find useful the detailed training programs outlined in Chapter 8. Administrators, teachers and parents concerned about school-wide bullying problems will want to read Chapters 5 and 6 to learn about successful approaches adopted in Norway and England. An annotated bibliography lists fiction and nonfiction resources for children and parents.

Ross believes that the optimum approach to countering bullying consists of three elements: primary prevention (teaching preschool children the skills of getting along with each other), secondary prevention (elementary school campaigns specifically targeting bullying) and community involvement (such as neighborhood watch programs) to extend schools' influence. She is pessimistic, however, about the likelihood that such a three-pronged approach will become widespread until society recognizes childhood bullying as the antecedent of criminal violence, and becomes as willing to invest resources in prevention as it is to spend dollars for the incarceration of criminals and treatment of victims. Reviewed by Patricia F. Hearron, Assistant Professor of Child Development, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC