- What makes a child become a bully?
- Why does a bully feel good when he bullies his friends?
Recent research has shown that bullies don’t have low self-esteem as was previously thought, but it showed that most of them have average and sometimes above-average self-esteem.
So if the child who became a bully is not doing it to feel worthy, why did he become a bully?
It was found that most bullies come from families that have a lot of violence in their daily lives. So, for example, if the child sees his father beating his mother now and then, he might start to think that violence is a good option to solve problems, and he might become a bully.
Reasons children become bullies.
The bully’s house usually lacks empathy and adequate supervision; that’s why the aggressive tendencies for the child grow until he starts bullying his friends.
When that child faces a problem such as lack of attention in school, he uses the aggression he learned at home (since it’s a valid option for him) to capture attention and appear cool.
Other children become bullies as a result of being bullied themselves or even abused. Those children usually look for weaker victims to bully to regain the sense of control they lost when they were bullied themselves.
It’s quite common for a bully to look for a weak victim, which he can recognize from his experience to exert control over him with the least effort.
A child can become a bully because feelings of shame, high self-esteem, and shame can coexist.
Even though it was found that a bully can have high self-esteem still it was found that he experiences a certain degree of shame.
This shame comes from feeling that he is undesirable or not loved (maybe because of being abused at his home), and that’s why he uses bullying to maintain his psychological balance.
While a child who became a bully might have good self-esteem, he might still be feeling ashamed of his weaknesses and actually afraid of getting them exposed.
