The story of a 13-year-old girl who confronted her bullies offers lessons for parents whose kids are struggling with similar torment.
By Beth Dalbey, Patch National Staff | Mar 22, 2018 10:16 am ET
GILBERT, AZ — The vicious words some kids hurl at their peers stick. Kalani Goldberg, 13, drove that point home in a video that illustrates the lasting power of bullying. As melancholy music plays in the background, the Phoenix-area eighth-grader sits alone, her T-shirt covered with adhesive-backed notes that convey some of the terrible things kids said about her — that she's "ugly," a "loser," a "waste of space" and worse.
"Every day you say these things about me," Kalani begins.
"I'm a sister, I'm a daughter, I'm a person and I have feelings," she concludes. "Every day, I wear your words. Every day, it hurts. Every day, you are hurting me. Every day, you are hurting each other. I don't want to wear your words anymore. So please stop. Stop hurting me."
The video struck an emotional chord with some of the tens of thousands of kids across the country who have been bullied or cyberbullied — the online version of schoolyard taunts — and with their parents. Moms and dads used to fret about their children's safety when they got their first car; now, a growing number worry their sons and daughters will run into a bully every time they go to school or turn on a computer and won't make it out of adolescence alive.
A frightening number of children as young as Kalani have killed themselves to escape bullying, and tens of thousands stay home from school every day to avoid their tormentors. Over the next year, Patch will look at what many experts call a major public health crisis in a special reporting project, "The Menace of Bullies: Can We Stop This?"
Kalani got enough support with her video that her shamed bullies backed down and the other kids in her middle school stood up in her defense. The girl's fame is one thing, but the bigger issue for Jared and Regina Goldberg is that they got Kalani to open up about the bullies who had been saying mean things about her for a couple of months.
To other parents, Regina offers this: Make your kids talk about what's going wrong in their lives. Pry it out of them. For every excuse they give to clam up, give them a reason they shouldn't.
"The first thing you hear from every parent (whose bullied child commits suicide) has been the same across the board," Regina said. "They all said they had no idea something was wrong."
NO STUPID REASONS FOR ANGST
It wasn't easy to get Kalani to finally explain what had put her "in a mood" earlier this month — behavior her mother said went far beyond normal teen angst. The Goldbergs pressed for answers Kalani was initially reluctant to give.
When she said she "sits in her room and cries for no reason," her parents countered there's always a reason; when Kalani said her sadness was for "kind of a stupid reason," Regina said "try me."
"There's no such thing as stupid feelings or feelings that don't matter," she told her daughter. "If it's important to you, it's important to me and your dad."
Kalani still wasn't convinced. What did she have to complain about?
"I have a great life," she told her parents before finally opening up. "You aren't divorced and you like each other. I have too much to be grateful for."
Bullied kids come in all body types, races, ethnicities and socioeconomic classes, and they're as likely to be pretty and handsome as not, according to Nicholas Carlisle, the founder of NoBully.org and one of the nation's leading experts on the topic. They may have low self-esteem or loneliness in common, but mainly they're targeted because of a difference or perceived difference that sets them apart.
In Kalani's case, that difference was her youth and intelligence.
She's whip-smart and began reading the Harry Potter books at age 5. She started kindergarten at age 4, a year earlier than the other kids in her class. While the other girls in her class were talking about makeup, dating and boy bands, Kalani was more interested in social sciences and history.
"I'm smart and I like to participate in class and kids don't like that," Kalani told her mother.
"I don't want you to dumb yourself down just to fit in," her mother said. ...
https://patch.com/new-york/freeport/s/gdsjg/teen-tells-bullies-in-video-every-day-i-wear-your-words