⚡️MINI: Dr Justin Coulson

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
My hard podcasts, hear more kids podcasts, playlists and listen
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Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hey, It's Willem Woody. It is Bullying No Way Week
this eleventh through fifteenth of August. Woods. You can register
your school today at Bullying no Way dot gov dot Au.
We have Justin Coulson who's on right now. Justin is
the co host and parenting expert on Channel nine's Parental
Guidiance Guidance and the founder of Happy Families dot com.

(00:37):
Dou is a PhD in psychology and he's one of
Australia's most trusted parenting experts. To join us right now
on Willem Woody, Justin, can you tell us about the
campaign please mate?

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Yeah? In a nutshell. Well, we've got some concerning stats
in Australia. Australia ranks is the second highest for bullying
among twenty four OECD countries. The only country that has
more bullying than Australia is Latvia. And so the government
is rightfully stepping into saying let's take a really strong
policy position here, Let's take a stand and really put

(01:09):
this front and center. Let's let people know that bullying
is happening. It's happening a way too much. Nearly one
in five Aussie teenagers reports being bullied by other students,
big numbers, and the impact is significant, And so the
government is really saying, let's have a week of conversation
about this, bring it front and center and start to

(01:30):
say no way, just no way, it's not okay.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
He's a pretty confronting stats to hear about. Justin Will
and I both have very young daughters. Will's daughters three,
my daughter's almost three. So if we get to a
point where we are sensing that maybe one of our
daughters is getting bullied, what's a good first step to take.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Well, let me quickly highlight some stats here. Grade four
is actually the age or the grade where we see
the highest amount of bullying. There's just something about kids
when they get to a round about the age of
nine or ten, it's almost like they start to realize, oh,
hang on, I can use my power and I can
start to shove people around a little bit, whether verbally
or physically or any number of other ways. And then

(02:12):
of course the bullying kind of it shifts against bigger.
As the kids get older, it kind of changes and
it follows them home more because of screens, but in
terms of what to say to your kids if they
tell you that they're being bullied. If you ask your
children directly, most of the time they won't tell you
because what kids. While it's embarrassing, they feel like they're incompetent.

(02:33):
But also most kids have kind of figured out that
when adults get involved, it doesn't always end well. You
want to watch out for the sudden hatred of school,
or the mysterious stomach aches, or the confidence collapse. When
you've got a child who is previously happy and they
start saying things like I'm no good. Well, sometimes it's
a phase, but more often than not, it's systematic destruction

(02:54):
of their self worth. It's happening right under your nose,
and it's happening because there are some kids being unkind
and that bullying, that repeated patternum intentional harm towards your
child is starting to mount up.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
It's really hard, though, because you see your kids suffering,
and you know that in the kid is causing that.
Obviously that's just another kid. How do you try and
help your child respond? What? You actually took one of
your six daughters out of school and homeschool them because
of bullying.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, it's pretty rough. I mean, I think one thing
that we have to recognize is that sometimes you can
do all the right things, and every now and again
there are some kids who are just impervious to any
adult influence and there, for whatever reason, they're going to bully.
The good news. The good news is that most of
the time that isn't necessarily most of the time we
can sit with our kids and guide them through it.

(03:39):
So I've got a little three wood pneumonic, a little
three wood phrase that I use all the time when
I'm talking to parents about these kinds of challenges, and
it's just support don't solve, generally speaking, when your kids
are having a really rough time, even if they're being bullied.
They don't actually want you to front up at the
school and start banging on doors or knocking heads together
or anything like that. That's not helpful. What they want

(04:00):
instead is they want a mature, regulated adult to sit
there and listen and say, well, that's really tough, and
how did you deal with that, and what do you
think you should do, and to do that supportive conversation,
which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do.
That will often be enough, because most of the time
our kids have got the resources within themselves to sort

(04:21):
things out. I need to emphasize though, that with really
pervasive bulling, with the really horrible stuff, sometimes that's not enough.
And if it's not enough, you're going to have been
having the conversations already. You're going to be watching for
those signs. At some point you'll say to your child,
it's time that we have a chat with other authorities.
We have a chat with the teacher. What you do
is you go and say, we're having some struggles. Are

(04:42):
you seeing it at school? And once you've explored a
little bit, you say, well, can we work together on
a solution so that we can be on the same team.
Here we've got a little girl or a little boy
who's having a really rough time, and we've got to
be on the same team with this.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
What made you take the step then, justin to homeschool
one of your girls.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
We were one of those minority situations where no matter
how many conversations we had with the school, and no
matter how hard they tried, there was just no aggress
It just kept on getting worse and worse. And anyone
who's had a child who's just saying I'm not going
to school. I don't think I can go to school today.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
It's brutal, so sad, Doctor Justin Coulson. I'm sure that
is every parent's worst nightmare. So it is brilliant that
you're coming on the show and talking about this. It
is Bullying no Way Week authorized by the Queensland Government Brisbane.
Discover a range of support and advice, or to learn
more about Bullying no Way Week of Action, head to
Bullying no Way dot gov. You it's really wouddy