Bullies, individuals who only feel powerful when abusing others, are a direct product of the environment they were raised within. Babies arrive in the world, helpless and open to anyone and anything that will give them the nourishment and nurturing that they need. They crave the physical closeness of others and when they are denied that physical contact, we know from studies, that they suffer lifelong detachment issues and may even evolve into sociopathic personalities.

There is an old saying that goes like this: “Show me a bully and I’ll show you a bigger bully that taught him.” Most any parent will tell you that in attempting to raise their children, it wasn’t so much what they said to their kids that made a difference in their child’s ability to empathize or to cooperate with others; it was what they did that their child imitated that made the difference. This stunning revelation came to this writer one winter day while coordinating a very large three day music festival and being surprised by a visit from husband and children. While engaged in a flurry of instructions to stage workers and gate agents on a walkie-talkie and a portable phone simultaneously, this writer turned to see her eldest child with an invisible walkie-talkie and phone giving crisp and direct orders to her imaginary staff in a chillingly accurate imitation of her mother; complete with reprimands and also kudos given for work well done.

Children are short, they are not stupid. They watch everything adults say and do and like little mynah birds, they repeat both and practice behaviors on playmates, classmates and siblings. In a household where an immature parent laughs when a person falls or is injured, the child will acquire the same taste for questionable humor and when the action of an injury doesn’t present itself for cruel humor, they will create one by shoving other children or encouraging them to do something dangerous in hopes of an injury. They stage these “accidents” for their entertainment and often in front of the offending and immature parent in a show of solidarity for their sick sense of humor.

If parents do not curb their own mean streak, they will most definitely pass it on to their children until the behavior reaches epidemic proportions as we can see from what we sadly call television entertainment. TV shows like Wipeout, encourage bullying behavior because they are created for a mind that finds injury, funny. Any individual who would willingly sit and watch other people smash their faces, snap their necks and fall onto surfaces that cause their bodies to flail and bruise is an individual with a very dark and mean streak in them. The startling fact that shows like this are regular viewing for some families, along with horror movies and action films that are far more violent than any child under 16 should ever be exposed to, shows a dramatic increase in parents who not only allow but encourage children to see violence and harm; physical, verbal and psychological, as an accepted part of life, exhibits a fatal disconnection between hurtful action and personality responsibility for the outcome of that action.

Children who are given violent video games at young ages are completely numb to real outcomes where situations like gun violence, car wrecks
and hand to hand combat occur. Military personal using remote combat tools like drones are suffering high levels of PTSD when they are faced with real life outcomes of dropping bombs on men, women and children in war zones. Having been sheltered from real life outcomes during their training, they are not ready for the carnage that actually happens after they have guided a missile to a place many miles away and unleashed it’s fury on living, breathing people. The suicide rate for combat soldiers who thought they could handle the horrors of war because they had “seen it all” in movies, on TV and in video games shows the contrast between action and results. More frightening are the soldiers who, after witnessing combat first hand, dive back into it with a glee, fervor and a high that only serial killers experience. Those soldiers learned, at a very young age, that having power over others makes them feel exponentially more powerful themselves. This is the ultimate in bullying: military might exerted over others for dubious reasons.

No infant is born into this world as an ethically corrupt newborn with design on harming others. They learn this behavior where they are raised and if their own parental figures do not work hard to evolve their own tendencies to bully, they will certainly pass their bad behaviors on to their own children, keeping alive the tradition of bullying in their families.