Bully Prevention Through the Learning of Martial Arts Part 1

Bullying is present in our everyday life whether it is at work, school or in the community. Whether we open our eyes and see that bullying is taking place is a completely different thing; however, understanding that bullying is present everywhere is the first step to bully prevention.
As a parent, you need to take action to help prevent bullying or at the very least, help your child prepare himself or herself for bullying on either side of the spectrum. Martial arts is an incredible program that helps children learn a number of factors such as confidence, respect, discipline, leadership, stress relief, self-control and self-defense; therefore, it helps both a child that has turned into a bully as well as a child that is being bullied.
In this two-part series, we will help you understand how each of the above-mentioned factors can help your child, as a bully or as a bullying victim, to overcome this type of behavior and step foot in the right direction.
Building Self-Confidence
• For bullies, their behavior comes from a need to be the person on top. They enjoy that others fear them and require a lot of attention. Martial arts works to focus on self-confidence in other aspects of life so that bullying won’t be needed to gain approval or attain the attention of others.
• For those being bullied, they are bullied because they are simply easy targets for the bully. They have a very low self-esteem, are weak and become scared easily. Martial arts help the victim by building their self-confidence so that they can display a sensation of strength, which will help ensure that they are not considered an easy target to a bully.
Increasing Respect
• For bullies, they have a very dominant need to be in control over others. In fact, this is one of the main reasons that they choose to bully other children. Martial arts can help show children that everyone – no matter what – deserves to be respected and that no one – no matter what – honestly deserves to be victimized.
• For those being bullied, they have a very low self-worth because of a low self-esteem. This is one of the most common and frequent signs of bullying taking place. Martial arts helps to show children that they need to learn to respect themselves if they ever expect for others to respect them. This just means that they need to believe in themselves and their self-worth is much higher than they believe.
Strengthening Discipline
• For bullies, a lack of discipline at home is often the reason that the child bullies others. Martial arts help to show children a structured discipline program that is straightforward and consistent. It will permit them to learn acceptable and unacceptable behaviors.
• For those being bullied, they can make things worse on themselves because of the way that they act. In fact, the way that they act is sometimes what draws the bully to them. Martial arts help these children learn that managing their own behavior through the art of discipline will not trigger the behavior of a bully.