I read a terrible story about an 11-year-old boy in Springfield, Massachusetts who killed himself when he could no longer cope with being bullied.

“Sirdeaner L. Walker found her son, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, hanging by an extension cord on the second floor of her Springfield home on Monday night. Walker said Carl, a sixth-grade student at the New Leadership Charter School, had been taunted and threatened by classmates for weeks before he killed himself. She said that she contacted the school repeatedly over the last six months to ask teachers to intervene after learning her son had been targeted by students. Walker said her son’s classmates called him gay on a daily basis, made fun of his clothes and threatened to harm him, according to the Springfield Republican.”

“I just want to help some other child. I know there are other kids being picked on, and it’s day in and day out,” says Walker.

Reading about this tragedy makes me so sad.  Why are kids so mean to each other?  What drives this kind behaviour?

Our generation has been “protected” … aka, everyone gets chosen for kickball.  So many precautions are taken to protect us from disappointment.  But it seems that few precautions are taken to prevent us from hurting each other.  Or perhaps we lack the training to protect our own feelings.  We haven’t learned how to cope with bullies.

I can’t offer any advice to stop bullies.  But I can offer advice that I learned from my grandfather.  He told me that I am the only person who can control how I feel.  No matter what anyone says, I am still in control.  By taking this control away from bullies, my feelings never get hurt.  And because I don’t give bullies power, they never bully me.  It’s great advice and with practice it works.

But threats of physical violence are an entirely different matter.  The schools and parents of the bullies should be held accountable when it comes to physical threats.  Any threat of violence should be taken very seriously.  Just because the threats come from children doesn’t mean that they can be ignored.  If what Ms. Walker alleges about calling the school every day regarding the threats is true, the school is culpable.  Judgement won’t bring back her son, but maybe schools and parents will learn that Bullies need to be stopped.