Our weekly children’s author guest blog comes from Jenny Alexander, who has written several anti-bullying books for kids and adults. Her child was bullied and she found no great resources for kids and parents, so she found information in adult self-help books, tried out the methods and passed them onto her child. Now, she’s passing on those same methods to you. In this blog post she tells you about two of her anti-bullying books.
By Jenny Alexander
I’ve written all sorts of fiction and non-fiction books for children but I’m probably best known for my books on bullying. I never intended to write self-help, but when one of my children was bullied at school, I discovered there was hardly any truly practical advice available to parents beyond ‘Talk to your child’ and ‘Inform the school.’ If that didn’t stop the problem, you were on your own.
Schools are very good at handling physical bullying because everyone is clear about who is in the wrong, but non-physical bullying is much harder to recognise and deal with. Teasing, whispering campaigns, exclusion and cyber bullying often go unchecked, yet they can cause devastating harm to a child’s confidence and self-esteem.
It seemed to me that children caught in this horrible situation needed tools to protect themselves psychologically, either on the short term until the school sorted things out or, in the worst-case scenario, on the longer term. They needed to learn how to hold onto their happiness and faith in other people, to handle high levels of anxiety and anger, and not to allow themselves to become victims.
I found all the information my child needed in adult self-help books. I was able to test the techniques for myself before passing on the best ones to my child because I found that, as the parent of a bullied child, I was suffering from all the same emotions – intense anxiety, murderous rage against the children involved, unhappiness and self-doubt.
The techniques I discovered worked so well that I wrote ‘When your Child is Bullied,’ to try and help other parents to get a handle on the situation and not feel so helpless and alone. Later, I wrote ‘Bullies, Bigmouths and So-called Friends,’ to make the ideas accessible for children in a practical, interesting and humorous way.
Bullying is a horrible problem and no-one should have to deal with it, but in the real world a great many people do. Some will be damaged by it but if we can help children to develop the emotional resilience to handle it, they will have valuable skills to handle everything in life.
To learn more about Jenny, please visit her web site at www.jennyalexander.co.uk . Here are links to her blog and books:
http://jenalexanderbooks.wordpress.com/
http://www.amazon.com/When-Your-Child-Bullied-Essential/dp/1416522352/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3
If you are an author and would like to tell our readers about your books for children - be they fiction or non-fiction, please contact asa (at) k5learning (dot) com.
