Teasing and Cyberbullying
Because children with ADHD and Learning Disabilities often make social mistakes, and often over-react to negative comments by other children, they are often the butt of jokes. Children with LD/ADHD may mishear a communication, interrupt, or answer out of turn, change the subject, misuse tone, misperceive the meaning of tone, intrude into another's personal space or not differentiate between friendly versus non friendly teasing. Because they make social errors and often don’t hear it when they are told to stop, children tease them.
But most importantly, children have to learn how to handle teasing.The ADDept Curriculum works with children to learn all these basic skills and particularly, defines a simple method of how to handle teasing. Click here to view a movie clip: "From Acting Out to Fitting In" Cyberbullying Cyberbullying: is the new form of teasing which can be very harmful and insidious. Kids from eight to eighteen, spend hours a day communicating in a virtual world. Whether they are on-line, on MySpace, Facebook or are using instant messaging (IMing) to communicate with each other, this virtual world is where they socialize, set up dates, and experiment with their identity. Their use of cyberspace is unprecedented. Along with the increased use of cyberspace, there is a new form of bullying, perhaps more powerful than the old form because the perpetrator may or may not be identified and the scope of influence of the teasing is much larger than the crowd a bully in the playground could amass.
The two things that make this form of teasing or bullying dangerous are that the perpetrator can be disguised or unknown, and the number of people who can get drawn into to the circle of perpetrator/victim is huge. As parents comment, you used to be able to escape teasing by going home. Internet bullying stays with you 24/7. Parents need to understand if their child is a victim or the perpetrator of cyberbullying The PBS documentary that aired January 20, 2008 can be viewed on their web site. Of particular interest, is the section on Cyberbullying.
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