Monday, May 19, 2025
Local nonprofit Your Time for Creative Empowerment held an anti-bullying conference on March 29 at the Merrick Golf Course Clubhouse, a Town of Hempstead facility, to examine the correlations of — and proactive solutions to — bullying.
The conference covered mental and emotional correlations of bullies and those bullied. Local parents reflected on the problem.
“There are some words associated with bullying,” Ira Gerald, a longtime educator and an award-winning school administrator in New York state, said. “Let’s see if you recognize them in your adult life: intimidate, dominate, terrorize, frighten, coerce…If bullying were limited to children, they wouldn’t have harassment laws.”
One key takeaway was that adults should exemplify coping skills for difficulties in life.
“You don’t have to say, ‘How was your day,’ and then tell them, ‘Don’t do this, do that,’” Gerald said. “Tell them stories about your life, about your coping. In your mind you’re really borrowing a little piece from their life and adding to it, using it as a teaching moment.
Organizer Madona Cole-Lacy emphasized another view.
“When the child goes to school to interact with other children, what happens is that child wants to walk out of that group alive,” Cole-Lacy said. “So they tend to gravitate towards negativity. It’s almost like, ‘If I don’t join them, then I’m going to be a victim.’”
Panelists agreed on correlations between mental-emotional states and being a bully.
“Children that are aggressive, easily frustrated, have less parental involvement, have issues at home, think badly of others, have difficulty following rules, view violence in a positive way, have friends who bully others,” Gerald said. “Wanting to dominate others, improve their social status, having low self-esteem and wanting to feel better about themselves, having a lack of remorse or failing to recognize their behavior as a problem, feeling angry, frustrated, jealous or struggling socially, being the victim of bullying themselves.”
This age-old problem plagues certain targets.
“Perceived as different from their peers, such as being overweight, underweight, wearing glasses, different clothing, brand new to a school, light skinned, dark skinned — unable to defend themselves, depressed, anxious, have low self-esteem — they normalize someone mistreating them,” Gerald added.
Clinical social worker and grief recovery specialist Marie Swiderski added perspective.
“It’s a loss of who they were, when things were in a better time for them,” Swiderski said. “A child loses himself, loses his self-esteem. The world can become a very scary place for him. With the right support though, with people caring, it can get a lot better.”
“Bullying can really distort the way a child thinks about themselves, and operates and functions,” Jeanine Cook-Garard, a nurse practitioner who spent 30 years teaching at Nassau Community College, said. “So I think that children that come to their parents and give them stories about bullying, it is essential that they respond immediately and make sure that there are interventions that are put in place for not just their own child but for all children.”
“Volunteer in your child’s school,” Gerald said. “If I see you every day coming to the school, once a week coming to the school, I’m going to make sure your child is not injured at all.”
Cole-Lacy doesn’t just leave it up to parents. She emphasized involving mental health practitioners, and the organization promotes children standing up for themselves.
“If someone is trying to bully you and you draw your line,” Cole-Lacy said. “And you say, ‘This is who I am. This is who I’m gonna be. Not what this person tells me that I’m going to be.’”
