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Why my child?
According to Randy Reynolds, author of Good News About Your Strong-Willed Child (Zondervan Publishing Company, 1995), the failure to set limits is one of the most common reasons why a child becomes a bully. "Setting boundaries for a child's behavior, and mostly importantly, sticking to them, is vital," he says.
When children bully, they are mimicking actions they have seen around them, says Richard B. Cohen, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles, Calif. "These kids are blank slates," he says. "Most of this bullying behavior is modeled in the family or in the peer group, and that's how the kids acquire their behavior."
Joyce Moore* of Brooklyn, N.Y., had to face this when her 11-year-old son started getting into trouble at school. "I kept getting calls about how angry Ben seemed to be and how he was taking it out on his peers, threatening them and punching them," she says.
Addressing the problem required Moore to look at her family situation, understanding that Ben had learned this behavior from seeing his father bullying his mother. "I knew that my ex-husband had been emotionally abusive to me, but I believed I had shielded Ben from it," she says.
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