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31st August 2017

What Are the Long-Term Effects of Bullying?

Long-Term Effects Of Bullying

Being bullied is a terrible thing for anyone to experience, and it can often take a long time to fully move on from the experience.

Although bullying is extremely difficult to deal with at the time you face it, the effects can sometimes be long lasting. A study on bullying by the British Journal of Educational Psychology conducted an interview with individuals who had been bullied. Results showed that 46% of respondents reported their effects persisted into adulthood.

Upset woman - bullying

You may not even realise that you’re dealing with the long-term emotional impact of a bullying experience from long ago. The first step is awareness of the symptoms that may arise.  It’s important to try and deal with these issues head on to stop them being triggered again in the future.

 

Let’s take a closer look some of the most common long-term effects that bullying can have:

 

  • Trust issues:

    Loss of trust can be one of the most challenging outcomes of bullying to overcome. Bullying can cause paranoia as it occurs, as you start to feel confused about who you can trust and rely on. You start to wonder if even those who are close to you are gossiping behind your back. This can sometimes result in long-term trust issues. Your prior negative experience with others can stop you from wanting to open up and trusting people your innermost feelings.

 

  • Loss of confidence:

    Bullying can, unfortunately, result in low self-esteem, as you lose confidence in your own worth and abilities. It can be difficult to forget the harmful things that a bully has told you about yourself, and perhaps you start to believe them. This is more likely to happen the earlier in life that you’ve been bullied. Our perception of ourselves is heavily shaped in our younger years. Since it especially deals with the underlying roots of issues and childhood experiences, schema therapy has proven effective for those dealing with such self-esteem issues.

 

  • Anxiety and depression:

    Those who may have been bullied can be more prone to bouts of depression, as they relive the memories of what they’ve had to face. They can also suffer from social anxiety and could potentially shut themselves down to interacting with others who they fear might treat them in the same manner. Isolating yourself can lead to sinking deeper into depression. Talking therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy can be hugely helpful in dealing with anxiety and depression.

upset man - bullying

  • Post-traumatic stress disorder:

    After the trauma of being bullied, it is possible that you could suffer from PTSD. This can lead to lack of sleep and a diminished appetite, which can then result in further health problems. Again, talking therapies are valuable in helping express your emotions around the bullying you’ve faced. A therapist can help you work on resolving your PTSD so you can stop reliving such traumatic experiences in your mind.

This is a collaborative post

How to Inspire a Love of Reading in Your Child

Inspire A Love Of Reading

Inspire a love of reading in your child
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
This is a collaborative post

It is a sad but true fact that the habit of reading is severely declining in the younger generations. There are so many other forms of entertainment available to them nowadays that most children are unwilling to go through anything other than their textbooks at school. The problem lies in the fact that they did not develop a love for reading during their most impressionable years. After all, reading is hard work and if special efforts are not made towards nurturing a love for the book while they are still in their early developmental stages, most kids will never reach that stage where reading a book becomes pleasurable and not just hard work. On that note, we will now take a look at four ways in which we can all inspire our children to take up reading as a hobby.

Read to them

Bedtime reading is a great practice, but that shouldn’t be the only time that you read to your children. Read to them during your daily cuddling sessions so that they can associate the very notion of stories and books with warm and positive emotional memories. Read to them every chance you get, but also make sure that it doesn’t become a monotonous activity. It should be something that your child should look forward to as a treat and not be wary of, like homework.

reading with your child
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Pre-Preparatory School

If you get your child enrolled into one of the best private pre prep schools in the area, he/she will learn the necessary basic skills of reading, writing, drawing, and counting, and be introduced to school subjects at a very early stage. Consequently, not only will the child consider reading to be a natural part of his/her daily routine, books and studies won’t seem as foreign to him/her, as it will to most other children.

Help the Child Progress Further with the Reading

Now that he/she knows how to read and actually wants to, the next step is to gradually make her comfortable with books that are a bit more difficult to read and understand. Read together with the child but stop every once in a while to let him/her continue on his/her own. If the book isn’t too hard for the child, they usually continue reading them even when you are not there. If that doesn’t happen, choose a simpler book or something on a different subject.

little girl reading
Image by adamova1210 from Pixabay

Comics are Not a Bad Idea

The transition to chapter books from picture books can be intimidating, so you can actually rely on comics to help them with the transition. Kid’s comics have inspired the love of reading in children for generations and there is no reason to think that it won’t work with the children of this generation either.

As mentioned in the title, we are trying to inspire a “love” of reading in our children, so whatever methods you adopt, make sure that they are never associated with forced discipline. The more you associate reading with positive emotions, the more your child will be interested in continuing the activity. When done right, the love of reading never really goes away, no matter how old they get.

boy reading
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
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