In this article Billy D Page PhD describes why every child should be told they are special and how their high self esteem is a change agent for bullying.
On HowToLearn.com we publish many articles on bullying and our Official Expert on Bullying is Dr. Kathy Seifert.
Recently, we received an article from News and Experts PR discussing a new book about bullying by Dr. Billy D. Page and modified a portion of the article for the reader’s on our site.
Dr. Page says he has seen just about everything children can experience, both positive and negative, and helped these kids solve bullying and other problems that some may think can’t be solved.
During his 33 years of teaching Dr. Page felt he did not need any type of special training, just his head and heart.
When he retired he became a children’s book author known as Billy D.
He feels that the best and worst kids in school can be bullies just on different days of the week and it certainly does not take an advanced degree to figure out why.
“It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out why a kid bullies another kid, or why that kid lets the other one bully him,” said Page, author of the children’s book
“Both kids are scared of something.
The kid who is being bullied is afraid of getting beat up, and the kid doing the bullying is afraid of most everything.
He knows that the secret is to connect with both kids, find out what they are afraid of and help them face down their fears.
The heart of the matter is really one of the most basic truths I know: every child is special. If you want to prevent problems, then parents and teachers simply need to remind kids of this fact on a regular basis. If you tell them often enough, they’ll begin to believe it and feel it, too.”
That is how bullying can be diminished via self-esteem.
But as much as Page is an idealist, he also knows he has to channel that idealism to kids through some harsh realism.
“I put the characters in my books through some paces,” he said.
“They encounter the challenges of responsibility, honesty, self-pride, peer pressure, sibling rivalry, and race relations. They experience the consequences of drug use, over-confidence and facing ridicule.
On the other hand, my characters also see the benefits from loving people, befriending them and cooperating with others. My characters are grounded by events that are true-to-life, so that the kids who read them, who are also dealing with the realism in their lives, can relate, understand and learn.”
In that way, Page believes kids who read his stories can unconsciously see the parallels in their own lives, and learn the same lessons his characters learn in his stories.
“Is the bully somehow less special than the bullied?” he asked.
“Or are both simply good kids in a bad situation who need to see that their lives can be better if they only see how special they are and the difference they can make in other lives?
We all need to know where we keep our strength, the parts of ourselves that help us overcome adversities. If our children don’t learn where those places are when they’re kids, they won’t know where to find those places as adults.
Billy D. Page, PhD, a.k.a. BillyD, is a graduate of Marion High School, Northern Iowa, Michigan State and St. Louis Universities.
He has published two books for children ages nine to twelve, and has others for children two to six near completion.
His latest book Boy Scouts, Bullies & Indian Creek is on bullying and self-esteem.
Dr. Page has been a teacher at all levels of public education from elementary through graduate school in Manson and Marion, Iowa, Lincoln Park, Michigan and adjunct professor for Western Michigan University.
He lives with his wife of sixty-three years in Muskegon, Michigan.
Portions of this article originally came from NewsandExpertsPR.com
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