Students face several challenges entering the school year – they are often getting familiar with a new set of teachers, learning new and more difficult subjects, and navigating complex social interactions with peers. For a significant percentage of students, one of those complex social challenges is bullying . Data from the 2021-2022 school year indicate that almost one in five (19.2%) U.S. students in grades 6-12 reported being bullied during school. Rates are much higher for those with diagnosed mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions with 42.2% reporting traditional bullying victimization and 21.8% reporting cyberbullying victimization. Addressing bullying early on is critical as it is linked to anxiety, mood disorders, loneliness, shame, low self-esteem, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and suicidal thoughts and self-harm. It also has an impact on school functioning with students who experienced bullying reporting effects on schoolwork, relationships, physical health and school avoidance.
Despite the significant concerns regarding bullying in youth, the research on effective intervention strategies is limited. The most successful efforts to address bullying typically require a systemic, multi-pronged approach that involves strong school and community collaboration. This might include schoolwide policies, staff training, social-emotional learning curricula, bystander engagement programs, parent and school coordination, and targeted actions for bullying incidents. Although the most effective interventions involve a comprehensive approach, individual mental health providers are often asked to support students who are experiencing bullying. Not unexpectedly, studies show they tend to feel unprepared to address this area. Surveys of school counselors and outpatient mental health providers indicated more comfort screening for and identifying bullying than intervening, and many requested more resources on addressing bullying with their youth clients.
So what can individual mental health providers do to help support youth experiencing bullying? Below are some approaches that providers can use to better equip youth and their families to combat bullying and to use their position to advocate for change. PracticeWise supports this work with specific tools that aid in treatment planning and implementation of evidence-informed strategies.
How can caregivers help address bullying?
- Caregivers often influence youth behavior through modeling and providing feedback. Coach caregivers to model kind and respectful behaviors and praise when their children are engaging in socially-appropriate behaviors as well as intervene when they are not. The Practice Guides on Modeling, Praise, and Natural and Logical Consequences walk through how to implement these strategies with caregivers.
- Teach caregivers warm, consistent, and non-coercive parenting strategies to discourage power dynamics that may facilitate bullying. The conduct protocol of the Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, or Conduct Problems (MATCH-ADTC) has many modules based on robust parent management training research that cover these relationship-enhancing and more effective discipline strategies.
- Work with caregivers to encourage their children to be positive bystanders that step in when other students are being bullied. The Communication Skills Practice Guides includes information on perspective-taking and ways for caregivers and youth to get their points across more effectively. Modeling is also an important skill here. Caregivers can demonstrate this behavior by making conscious efforts to show their children how to advocate for others in the community who are being mistreated.
- Make a plan for caregivers to monitor their children’s internet and social media usage. Providers can work with caregivers on a system for checking messages that their children receive from others and identify cyberbullying early on. This can often feel like a moving target as new platforms gain in popularity and youth find new ways to keep this content hidden. Common Sense Media has helpful guides for caregivers to better understand parental controls and common workarounds. The Monitoring Practice Guide also gives an overview of how caregivers can regularly track their children’s behaviors and moods.
- Crucially, help parents maintain clear and consistent communication with their local school administrators and teachers as well as work with schools directly to document incidents, make supervision and safety plans, and align home and school responses. The Educational Support Practice Guide is designed for supporting academic performance but many of the steps can be adapted to address socioemotional concerns.
How can providers support youth experiencing bullying?
- Work with youths to build their interpersonal skills and help them advocate for themselves in socially appropriate ways. Youth who are frequent targets of bullying often lack the ability to advocate for themselves and effectively ask for help. The Assertiveness Training Practice Guide teaches youth strategies to communicate their needs and practice this repeatedly, including back up strategies in case the first approach does not work. The Social Skills Practice Guide can also be adapted to coach children on how to deflect and reduce the negative attention that can perpetuate bullying.
- Help children develop their strengths and acknowledge their positive aspects. Developing youths’ confidence in their own abilities and strengthening their belief that they matter, and that their own actions lead to improvements can help buffer the impact of bullying. The Talent or Skill Building Practice Guide guides providers on how to identify interests and build proficiency in those areas. Additional guides that build healthy coping skills and emotion regulation are Activity Selection, Cognitive, Insight Building: Emotion Identification, and Self-Praise/Self-Reward.
- Where there are steps that youth can take to reduce bullying and the impact it has on their mental health, utilize problem solving skills. These skills can help youth feel more prepared to generate actionable responses to multiple types of situations in their lives. The Problem Solving Practice Guide outlines a powerful technique to teach youth how to identify and evaluate potential solutions in response to a stressor.
- Teach youth how to how to assess risks and maintain their safety to lower the potential for harm. Bullying often involves exposure to harmful situations that threaten a youth’s physical and mental safety. The Personal Safety Skills Practice Guide offers strategies on recognizing environmental risks and identifying resources and supports in advance.
- Sometimes bullying can lead to significant mental health concerns. If youths are experiencing post-traumatic stress in response to bullying, there are many practices that can lower their distress once the immediate safety concern has passed. MATCH-ADTC has a protocol for trauma with multiple modules that focus on decreasing intrusive memories and avoidance by walking through a narrative of their experiences. The anxiety and depression protocols may also be useful depending on the youth’s presentation in response to bullying.
How can mental health providers advocate for bullying prevention?
- Illustrate the damaging effects of bullying and highlight the need for better solutions through social media, webinars, books, articles, and school presentations. Mental health providers play an important role in advocacy efforts. The more that providers raise their voices to share their concerns, the more likely that others will hear it and that real change can come from it.
- Work directly with schools to adopt antibullying policies and to do more proactive screening that is followed by appropriate intervention. Consider joining local multidisciplinary committees focused on antibullying efforts or, if this does not exist in the area, work to create such a committee and invite important figures from the community, such as medical professionals, elected officials, police officers, clergy, and school staff members to join to get multiple perspectives on the issue.
Bullying is a major problem in the U.S., but it does not have to be. There are many things we can all do to reduce bullying, and mental health providers are a key part of that effort. For more information on PracticeWise tools that can help support youth and families experiencing bullying, visit practicewise.com.
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About the Author
Jennifer Regan, Ph.D., serves in multiple roles on the Services and Products Development team for PracticeWise. Learn more about Dr. Regan on the PracticeWise team page.
