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.