As a (future) educator and definitely as a mother, bullying is an enormous concern for me. In the classroom I try to be sensitive to signs of bullying. At home, my husband and I have always tried to instill compassion in our children, so that they would reach out to others who were left out or centred out.

A little over a year ago we discovered our confident, rather large, very strong for his age son was being bullied by a 'good' friend. Even though he knew the threats he was receiving would not be carried out (the bully was smaller and weaker than him) he felt that he had to take the verbal threats and not defend his honour or himself. The bully was the center of all the grade eight boys. They shared all of the same friends. He knew he could easily put a stop to the cyber threats at home and the embarassing taunts at school by confronting the bully. He also knew if he confronted him, their shared friends would have to choose between the two of them. He was pretty sure they would pick the side of the school's coolest kid. After two months he had enough and responded to the threat "you wanna go" with yes! Without hurting the boy, he put him in a submission hold on the ground in a matter of a second or two. The boy cried foul, my son let him up. The boy lunged for him and my son put him back on the ground in a submission hold. The bully was embarassed. My son won the fight, but lost the battle. The bully has never threatened him since, but did put pressure on the other kids not to hand around him. Our son started to become socially isolated. Many of the 'friends' choose cool. Instead of always having tons of buddies around, he only had a few.

It's taken a year, but some of the old friends are starting to come around again. My son puts up with them but feels betrayed and prefers the friends who stuck around him.

As a parent, we really felt like we could do nothing to put an end to it and all we could do was support him. If we turned to the school, we knew the social isolation would become worse.

Our son never lost his sense of confidence and did not regret standing up to the boy (although, he's lucky the boy didn't want to retaliate with a weapon), because losing a few friends was better than putting up with the harassment. He was lucky, he's the type of kid who will always have a few friends around.

The antibullying video you posted, drove home how detrimental bullying can be. There are no easy solutions to bullying. Hopefully, videos like this will help bystanders choose to be strong and back the victim. Adults can provide emotional support to the victim, they must provide safety, but they can't stop the social isolation that bullys can orchestrate. All adults can do is to try to instill a social consciousness in our adolescents.

After listening to Dr. Stuart Shanker's radio broadcast about the Bonobo Apes, I couldn't help but research the topic further. I found an amazing TEDtalks video at: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html with Susan Savage-Rumbaugh presenting her research and videos on the Bonobo Apes she works with.

Probably what stuck with me most after listening to Dr Shanker's broadcast was the fact the these apes have the ability to not only learn another language, they have in fact learned two languages (spoken english, and a form of sign language).

If it is true that we lose our ability to learn language without exposure before the age of 6, then it seems reasonable that apes would lose that ability at some point as well. Considering the fact that these apes (of various ages) have learned human like language, then possibly some Chomskian, language acquisition device is present in them, which must mean the ape comunities must use some form of language to communicate. (Maybe if not an aquisition devise, possibly a biological predisposition towards language aquistion ). It is amusing that without being taught these apes have learned to understand our language, yet we still can't communicate with them in their language.

It is also quite amazing that this species has the ability for empathy and self soothing. Could we learn more about the treatment of conditions such as autism by observing Bonobos?

I'm still pretty intrigued by the brain plasticity video we watched last week. I can't help but wonder about all of the implications of brain plasticity, especially in areas such as PDD's, and learning disabilities (although many other areas have me interested too, like Alzheimers{family history and aging parents}). I found the link between reading disorders and processing rapid auditory signals pretty promising. (Been wondering about the link between auditory processing and dyslexia for a couple of years myself). The fact that training the neural systems responsible for this processing is improving reading skills in the reading disordered kids, has me pretty optimistic that similar training may improve other L.D.'s. (from the Foundations for a New Science of Learning article) The research with externalizing/internalizing comorbid kids and the Go/No Go testing could lead to new types of therapy for these kids (including ADHD kids).

I'm not sure how much of the information on MNS I fully understand, but I found the connection to Autism (and ASD) rather interesting. (interesting article on the deficit of MNS in autistic individuals at this site, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/04/050411204511.htm) If you consider that children with autism have dysfunction with the MNS its easy to make a connection between the MNS and development of social relationships through responding to others with mimicry . Infants who are later diagnosed with Autism respond differently to their parents almost immediately, they don't recognize faces as distinct from objects which could mean that they are not programmed to watch facial expressions in order to mimic them. Parents have reported that their infants did not follow their gaze, but also did not respond to a parents embrace/hold. Instead of imitating the parents embrace and snuggling in, they lay limp which could be interpreted as not mimicking the embrace. I guess what I'm trying to say is in retrospect many parents of autistic children recognize differences in their autistic babies almost from the start of life. If the MNS is responsible for much of the social deficiencies in autistic people, it possibly provides evidence of the existance of the MNS at birth. It could be that the reason that a confident diagnosis of autism can't be made until children are older (6-10) is because either the MNS is still developing, or because the effects of inability to mimic create an escalating problem that isn't fully visible until later.