Behavior modification principles are blind to whether they achieve good or bad results. It will be up to you to ensure that the results are good, or to use the principles to stop something bad from happening. You can also teach your child to use these principles to make his life better.

Children sometimes have real problems by being picked out by the other children to be the target of torment. I'm sure you have seen it happen often and perhaps your own child has experienced this. You might even remember it happening to you when you were a child.

There are always bullies and near-bullies who delight in tormenting some poor victim. The unfortunate child who is picked for this gets a real nightmare. The target child develops fear of going to school or wherever the torment takes place. The target child also starts having emotional disturbance symptoms. You may not even be aware of what is happening at school, but you may see changes in your child's behavior.

This chapter shows you why many of these situations occur and what you can do to help your child to get them stopped. It won't be very helpful for you to intervene directly because this will cause other problems for the child. It will be much better for the child to handle the problem effectively. This will help immensely with the child's self-esteem and may prevent some psychologist from making money from you later on.

Let's examine the process in the context of common-sense behavior modification principles. First, we need to define the behaviors that are happening and which we want to change.

The behaviors we want to change in this situation are the things the other children are doing that torment your child. Such things as physically poking, hitting, pinching, and the like are often done. These seem to be less of a problem than the emotional jabs constantly given the child. The bullies seem to be able to find a child's sensitive areas and to poke them unmercifully. The target child will cry, look hurt, scream, and generally respond dramatically to the torment. Obviously the reinforcer for the bully is just that kind of response from the target child.

It's like playing a pinball machine. You put in your quarter, press some buttons or levers, and the ball hits things that ding, buzz, rattle, light up, and generally create a very noticeable fuss--all because you pushed the right button. What is the solution to this? Did you ever see someone keep playing the pinball machine after it had tilted and stopped working? Once the lights stop lighting, the dings stop dinging, the buzzes stop buzzing, and the rattles stop rattling, playing is no longer rewarding and the play stops, or another quarter is fed the machine and it starts rewarding all over again.

I'll bet you can begin to see how to apply common-sense behavior modification now. All the target child has to do to stop the tormenting is to stop responding to the torment. I know it will be difficult, but that's how it is. Also, if the target child relapses back into responding after a period of trying to stop, that will cause it to be harder to extinguish the undesirable behaviors the next time. Remember Rule 6 which says if you aren't ready to remove 100% of the rewards, don't do anything.

When your child comes to you about something like this happening to him, don't get outraged and go up to the school to talk to the principal. Teach your child about how this works and help him solve his own problem. He will feel immensely better about it and it is most likely the only way that can be expected to be successful.

When the principal gets into the act, the other children have ways of changing or increasing the torment and will be delighted to do it. You can't always protect your child from these things, but you can help him learn how to protect himself.

When it's a case of verbal teasing and name-calling, it may help if the target child can learn to develop a sense of humor about it. If he can laugh along with his tormentors it will tend to dampen the pleasure they get from teasing him.

There are sometimes situations that do require your intervention. There are children who are real hoodlums and who will rob, beat, or waylay your children on the way home from school. These are not the kinds of torment I am talking about in this chapter. These are the beginnings of criminal behavior and simple behavior modification methods will not work.

Unfortunately, truly dangerous situations are becoming more and more common in our schools. Things are happening, such as children bringing guns into the school, that we could not have imagined a few years ago. But these kinds of things are something else that is outside the realm of what this book talks about. Those situations must be handled by community action and police intervention.

Let's return to our original subject of ordinary bullying and tormenting. We've gone into the non-violent approach. Should you teach your child to fight back physically? I'm not even going to get into that. Each parent or set of parents probably already has strong opinions, either pro or con, on that subject. That is a question that is separate from the subject matter of this book.

Having said all that, I am going to make a couple of observations about the pitfalls of teaching a child to react physically. In one case a two-year-old boy of our acquaintance is being taught to "defend himself." The trouble is, he is too young to understand the nuances of the act of physical violence. All he knows is he is being told it's okay to kick, bite, and hit. Other children who come near him are likely to have the bruises and cuts to show for it.

A second instance is a little boy my wife taught years ago in third grade. He was a real problem because any time another child touched him he kicked out with his pointed cowboy boots. She said he wasn't a particularly vicious child otherwise, but he had been taught to retaliate if anyone bothered him. So much as an accidental jostle in line and that sharp pointed boot shot out and found its mark. That was a case, by the way, that required teacher intervention.

Let me repeat what I said earlier. You can teach your child to deal with everyday, ordinary teasing and tormenting. Make him aware he can stop the torment by stopping his response to it. Remember the pinball machine. When the tormentors find they are no longer getting a reaction, they lose interest. It may not be easy at first, so the target child needs to guard against relapsing back into responding. He may have to hang in there for a while. But he is the only one who can do anything about it in the long run.