Thank you all so much for you support. I really appreciate every word. Hopefully parents, teachers and administrators together can make our schools the safest place possible.

agree too w crewchief, the gift of fear is a must read for EVERY parent.

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman is also fantastic (why emotional intelligence is more important or indicative of success in life than are SAT scores,,....and what do school stress????? the wrong thing! or, only one thing, grades, and not the whole person!!)

Boy oh boy, zerotolerance, you are absolutely right. Adult bullies do foster that behavior in their children. How do you get parents to help their children change if they themselves don't see anything wrong?

kmamom, thanks for mentioning the Coloroso book. I'm going to get a copy of it.

When I mentioned the 'tattling bullies' in a previous post, I guess I was unclear. The word tattling in itself sounds minor but what happened was not minor. Kids learned they could tell any monitor anything and it was all given the same reaction. Everything from 'she won't share the jumprope' to 'he threw me down and kicked my head' were given the same response. Innocent kids were given serious punishments for serious offenses simply because the tattler told a convincing tale. That caused a backlash of 'Stop tattling! If I didn't see it, it didn't happen.', causing a whole different problem. Kids just as quickly learned they could get away with anything as long as nobody saw them. It took awhile to work things back to a system that balanced the scales.

Through it all, though, it was parents, teacher, monitors and administrators working together to make the playground safer.

My favorite book is Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe by Gavin De Becker. His book, The Gift of Fear deals with serious issues as well.

kmamom, i just finished the colorosso book yesterday, and it has been the NUMBER ONE most helpful info so far (i am new here to msg bd) i have found on this site. a must read for all parents, and the most important message i found is this: those (kids and) parents who turn the other way and excuse or ignore the bad behavior are JUST AS guilty as those who commit the bullying. we cannot sit idly by and let little problems become BIG problems further down the road. after all, what kind of kids will one day run the country if parents and admin tolerate bullying in elem school? yikes. i am going to mars if the kids at MY SCHOOL run the country. not cuz the kids are bad, but they have what i percieve to be less than desirable parenting models becuase i am guessing that adults that bully adults ie PTO, will tolerate such or even foster such actions in their young.

I don't know how big your school is, but in our school the grade separation idea helps. While I despise tattling, and am sympathetic to lunch aides who have to hear it all the time, there's a vast difference between tattling and asking for help. I've tried training my kids and their friends in the finer points of this, and they've found it helpful when they're ina situation that they just can't cope with.

This is a good one:

The Bully, The Bullied and the Bystander, by Barbara Coloroso. Here's the description:

It's a deadly triad: bullies who terrorize, bullied kids who are afraid to tell, bystanders who watch, participate, or look away, and adults who dismiss the incidents as a normal part of childhood. Drawing on her decades of work with youth, this practical book by bestselling parenting educator Barbara Coloroso explains:

* The three kinds of bullying; and the differences between boy and girl bullies

* Four abilities that protect your child from succumbing to bullying

* Seven steps to take if your child is a bully

* How to help the bullied child heal and effectively discipline the bully

* How to evaluate a school's antibullying policy and much more

i agree it (bullying) should be talked about w the teachers, but ALSO awareness raised to other parents. that is the ONLY way to stop bullying, AWARENESS is needed before preventive measures or action can be taken,ie at home, instructing our children how to act and NOT to act. and telling them it will NOT be tolerated . teachers and admin can do only so much, we have our kids 18 hours a day, we have to do more as PARENTS. in the way of educating our kids about proper behaviour.