Yet another teen death, Rebecca Ann Sedwick was the tragic victim of on-line bullying. Like an insidious disease that defies treatment, on-line bullying is stealing the childhood of our children.

 Bullying stinks, its hurtful, cowardly and has devastating consequences for  all involved. As today’s article in the SMH shows, our kids need help – so do  their parents. Despite awareness campaigns and parental determination to  protect children, bullies find them. The rapid pace of technological change  has fuelled social media growth and parents, schools and government  can’t  keep up. We need more than treatments. We need to arm  our kids so they  can protect themselves. I have blogged about this before. We need to give  our children the skills, tools and mind strength to prevent the effects of  bullying behaviour.

 

How?

By helping children recognise who they are, where they are and where they want to go. This is what workshops such as our MyStory Mind help teenagers learn – the skills that schools don’t have time to teach. Our kids need to learn how to recognise their emotions and how to manage them. They need to learn how to distinguish their own thoughts from the thoughts of others and they need to uncover their own internal strengths.

Here’s something that many adults tend to forget or overlook – the internal world of a teenager is as real as the external one. I’ll repeat that because it’s important. The internal world of a teenager is as real as the external one. It is within this internal realm that teenagers (in fact most of us) are most vulnerable because it is the one we don’t see. It is the space of thoughts and emotions and these thoughts and emotions have the power to uplift and the power to tear down.

But there is good news. 

We can teach our children how to recognise internal strength and generate their own self esteem. We can help them gather the tools to thrive in their internal world. The benefit of thriving internally, is that the results are amplified in the external world. Put at its most basic, positive people attract positive people, confident people inspire confidence and success attracts success.

How will you help the teenagers in your life become the self aware, self responsible and proactive person that lives the life they dream of?