By the Numbers: What the New York Times Tells Us About Bullying
Posted on 07. Nov, 2013 by Rebeldad.
I mentioned earlier in the week that the call for anecdotes about bullying — a joint project of the New York Times’ Booming and Motherlode blogs — was not just an opportunity to create an interesting anthology of bullying tales. It was also the opportunity to create a dataset that could be mined to learn more about exactly what people talk about when they talk about “bullying.” With so many stories, certain commonalities and trends were bound to emerge if the stories posted in the comments were examined closely enough.
So that’s what I did. I looked over all 255 comments (as of late Thursday evening) and code each and every one for a variety of factors: at what age (elementary school, middle school, high school, college) did the incidents take place? What was the sex of the victim? What kind of bullying was described (physical, emotional, cyber)? Did parents intervene? Was the anecdote a personal story of bullying, or was the narrative about the commenters child?
In the end, it ended being a relatively comprehensive dataset: 114 separate stories of bullying, which was more than enough to begin examining for patterns.**
There’s too much to examine in a single post without boring you guys, so this is the first in a three-part series. Next week, I’ll look at the differences in bullying patterns between boys and girls, and I’ll look at some of the striking differences between those who wrote about their personal experiences with bullying (in the long past) and those describing anecdotes of their children, which tend to be of a more recent vintage.
But the topline results are not without value. For starters, bullying is a sex-blind issue: 48.2 percent of posts talked about boys being bullied, 51.8 percent mentioned girls. A majority — 51.8 percent — involved children in elementary school.
Remarkably, more than a quarter of all stories dealt with a personal experience, despite the NYT’s clear ask for examples of where readers, as parents, intervened or failed to intervene. If anything, that’s a sign of how deep the wounds can be; years, even decades later, the NYT posts were an opportunity for readers to unburden themselves.
Perhaps the most interesting figure involved cyberbullying, which featured in only 4 of the 114 stories, a rate of less than 5 percent. The rate is almost certainly higher (no doubt there are bullying posts that failed the mention the involvement of social media), but given the attention to cyberbullying (remember, it’s the top keyword for Google searches about teens) and the general readership of the NYT blogs (from more-wired homes, I’d wager), the general silence on the topic is worth exploration.
** There are a number of reasons why this particular group of stories may not be representative of all bullying, and I won’t take pains to describe all of those biases here. Among other faults, there is certainly reporting bias (parents can only report what they know, and a child bullied in silence is invisible) as well as recall bias. The readership of Booming and Motherlode, too, may have surfaced more stories about certain age groups. Where details were not explicit, I have extrapolated details, including age and sex and type of bullying, from the context of the post. That extrapolation is an inexact process, but my hope is that the number of stories will, statistically, smooth out some of these liberties.
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The Facebook Bullying Prevention Hub: First Thoughts
Posted on 06. Nov, 2013 by Rebeldad.
Facebook rolled out a new anti-bullying effort today — the Bullying Prevention Hub — and I’m of two minds about it.
On the one hand, Facebook has created a really nice set of content about how teens (and parents) can learn more about bullying, bullying prevention and how to talk about those issues. They’ve partnered with Yale and the strategies feel spot-on: not too simple, not too pat, not too one-size-fits-all. The best stuff on the Bullying Prevention Hub isn’t Facebook-specific (or even cyber-specific) at all. You could print it out and hand it out at middle school orientation and the world would be a demonstratively better place.
The issue, of course, is that there’s not a huge dearth of smart information about bullying out there. It’s nice to have one more resource, and I hope it’s easy to track down on the Facebook site, but no matter what, there will be at least a modicum of effort required to find it. And whether teens or parents will make that effort is an open question. But that’s picking nits: the team that created this deserves a huge round of applause.
That leads to the “on the other hand” part of my thinking: Facebook still doesn’t seem to have particularly good or intuitive system for reporting bullying content. The big reveal today (I think) is the ability to use the abuse-reporting system to tell a trusted adult about the issue, but that process — already somewhat awkward — is far from simple. And while the blocking and unfollowing tools that are highlighted are unquestionably useful, these are not concepts that are particularly radical or new.
I don’t know if there is a bias against making a more aggressive bullying-detection system for Facebook. It doesn’t take much brainstorming to think of interesting technological solutions that could be aimed at, say, the under 18 crowd, but it’s likely that the more obtrusive any system is, the more it will drive teens to other platforms, many of which are fundamentally more bully-friendly than Facebook.
(n.b. The Washington Post also correctly pointed out that today’s endeavor related only to Facebook, and not to its corporate sibling, Instagram, where the potential for mischief may actually be higher.)
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Curling Dumbbells, Curling Beers
Posted on 06. Nov, 2013 by Rebeldad.
From the journal JAMA Pediatrics this week comes some interesting data on boys 12 to 18 years old: boys in that age range who are preoccupied with “muscularity” or thinness were about twice as likely to use drugs and those using supplements to bulk up were twice as likely to binge drink as their peers.
Obviously, drinking and drug use are bad, and most parents — I assume — tend to be in the dark about the frequency of that kind of behavior in their teens. So looking for red-flag behaviors is relatively important. It’s why everyone is always told to look for sudden changes in friendships or interests. But the idea that the guys in the weight room are the party animals probably needs some unpacking, which was beyond the scope of the paper.
There are a lot of plausible reasons why body-obsessed guys would be doing the drinking-and-drugs thing. Clearly, an obsession with body image is a signal of deeper problems**, making it a short leap to substance abuse. It’s also reasonable to suggestion that “muscularity” is associated with high-level athletics, and that drinking is a jock problem. Or, perhaps, time in the weight room tends to be a dangerously adult-free zone. Or perhaps weight-rooms tend to mix older, more “experienced” kids with younger, more impressionable boys (a problem that might be mirrored in, say, drama clubs or other age-integrated activities).
Still, this is helpful information to have as a parent. Just because your kid is checking his biceps doesn’t mean that there’s a plastic bottle of vodka in his sock drawer, but it’s a reminder that an obsession with “health” could be overshadowing far less healthy behaviors.
For your reference, here’s the meat of the study:
From 1999 through 2011 in at least 1 study year, 9.2% of respondents reported high concerns with muscularity but no bulimic behaviors; 2.4%, high concerns with muscularity and use of supplements, growth hormone derivatives, or anabolic steroids to achieve their desired physique; 2.5%, high concerns with thinness but no bulimic behaviors; and 6.3%, high concerns with thinness and muscularity. For eating disorders, 0.8% had partial- or full-criteria bulimia nervosa or purging disorder and 2.9% had partial or full-criteria binge eating disorder but no association with the outcomes of interest. Infrequent binge eating or purging or overeating without a loss of control were reported by 31.0%. However, independent of age and body mass index, males with high concerns about thinness but not muscularity were more likely to develop high depressive symptoms (odds ratio, 2.72; 95% CI, 1.36-5.44). Males with high concerns about muscularity and thinness were more likely than their peers to use drugs (odds ratio, 2.13; 95% CI, 1.31-3.46), and males with high concerns about muscularity who used supplements and other products to enhance physique were more likely to start binge drinking frequently (2.06; 1.58-2.69) and using drugs (2.16; 1.49-3.11).
** It’s entirely possible to read the JAMA Pediatrics piece as a call to action on the prevalence of body-image issues with young men, who tend to be overlooked when it comes to issues of eating disorders. As noted above, the new study fixes the rate of bulimia at 1 in 125, and the rate of binge eating disorder closer to 1 in 30, with more than 30 percent reporting infrequent binge eating or purging.
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Getting Social With Rebeldad
Posted on 05. Nov, 2013 by Rebeldad.
When I started this blog 11 years ago, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Google Plus, no … you get the idea. People followed blogs and news by either using RSS or bookmarking sites and then clicking. A lot.
Everything is different now, and news tends to get surfaced on social networks. So if you’d like to be alerted of new posts here, I want to give you a couple of options that don’t require you to hit “refresh” every couple of days.
First: there is now a Facebook community that you can “like” where I’ll post links to new posts. It’ll also be a platform for discussion, so if you have something to say and don’t want to say it in the comments here, you can do it there.
Second: I’ll post everything to Google Plus, too, so if you follow me there, you’ll hear about posts as soon as they hit.
Or you can do this the old-fashioned way and bookmark or stick it in your RSS reader. If there’s demand, I’ll work on getting email subscriptions up and running, too.
Thanks for your support on this, and I look forward to hearing from you here, or on Facebook, or on G+.
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Crunching the Numbers on This Whole ‘Bully’ Thing
Posted on 05. Nov, 2013 by Rebeldad.
In my last post, I lamented a bit about the expansive definition of “bully,” and how the word covers a tremendous amount of ground. I’d love to quantify that, and I think the New York Times tell-us-about-bullying blog project may be a great way in.
Here’s what I plan to do: code each one of the stories left in the comments to gauge, generally, the age and sex of the victim, as well as the nature of the bullying (physical, emotional, online). While the sample isn’t perfect, it should give an interesting snapshot of the experiences of one relatively large group of folks. With 200-odd comments (and counting), I can’t promise this will be quick. But it should be worthwhile. I plan on doing this on a public Google Spreadsheet, so you can check my work.
Stay tuned.
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The NY Times Wants *Your* Bullying Tale
Posted on 04. Nov, 2013 by Rebeldad.
Two of the hotter New York Times blogs, the boomer-centered “Booming” blog and the “Motherload” parenting blog — are teaming up this week to generate reader stories of bullying and whether parenting intervention was appropriate.
Here’s how author Michael Winerip sets it up:
It is a very painful and scary thing for parents to learn that their child is being bullied. Though my four — now young adults — were relatively popular and athletic kids, I watched them go through bullying several times. It was one of the the harder problems I faced as a dad, and it’s the topic we are asking our readers to discuss this week: Do I intervene on behalf of my children or hold back and let them work out the problem themselves?
It’s a damn good question, and Winerip said that he’ll collect and re-published the best stories from the comments on Friday. You can get a sneak peek, though, by clicking through the more than 200 stories already posted in the comments. (For a pithier romp through the comments, click “Readers Picks.”)
Perusing the comments, however, brings up one of elements of bullying that I’m finding most difficult as I immerse myself in the topic: bullying is a maddeningly broad topic. There is classic bullying, the kind of physical altercation that defined my first experience with bullying when I was 7. And then there are a thousand different flavors of emotional bullying, including Winerip’s description of his own experience as a parent. There is a huge range of ages and techniques and contexts in which the bullying occurs.
All of this seems like it makes it profoundly hard to come up with a standard flowchart for how a parent should respond to bullying. But it does give a sense for the variety of behavior covered by that single word.
If you have a tale to tell, leave an NY Times comment, and shoot me the link. I’ll share it here, and we can all upvote your comment.
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What’s On the Brains of Teens (And Parents)
Posted on 03. Nov, 2013 by Rebeldad.
I’ve been thinking through the topical mix of the new rebeldad.com, and my biggest worry is that my default will be to write about things that are interest to me (technology! youth sports!), and might not really represent the broader conversation about parenting teens. So as a grounding exercise, I went to the people who constantly monitor the zeitgeist: Google.
Using their Keyword Planner, I checked the search terms associated with “teens.” This is as close as we come to truth in this era: what we plug into search engines tends to show what’s really on our minds.
And what’s on the minds of people typing “teens” into Google? The list is below, but — holy moly — bullying is the big one. By a long shot. But depression makes the list, too. So does pregnancy. (Teen bedding is apparently a big area of concern, too. Not sure what to make of that.)
That doesn’t mean that Rebeldad will be all bullying, all the time. But I do plan to keep an eye on Google to make sure that I’m not off in my own little world. And, of course, I’ll be curious what’s eating you, too. So if there’s a topic seems to be ignored, just shout.
