What Does Bully-proof Mean?
The term bully-proof simply means equipping your child with the best skills available so that they may be able to handle physical threats, social intimidation and mental torment from peers and classmates.
According to the National Bullying Prevention Center more than more than 1 out of 5 students reported incidents of bullying.
Stats collected by the Department of Education claims that 28% of all students are victims of bullying.
How can you Bullyproof your child?
While we cannot always find a cause or even a moment that a child became a bully, there are several schools of thought on how to protect yourself from a bully, this is where wrestling comes in. It’s not easy for a child to instinctively know how to deal with bullies on their own but by steering them in the right direction you might get ahead of the game.
How Can Wrestling Bully-proof your Child?
The last thing you want your child to do is resort to physical violence, however, wrestling provides many tools that help cope with this problem.
Here is a short list of what wrestling can do for your child in regards to bullying and why it helps.
- Team: It is much harder to single out ONE child when they are surrounded by a group of athletes. Wrestling is, in some ways, an individual sport but the results of your individual matches does contribute to your teams score. It is a fact that if you spend months or even years working side by side with someone towards a common goal, the like hood that that will be found alone at any point in time is going to be rather small.
- Confidence: As mentioned above, wrestling is an individual sport that has team consequences. Since a wrestler does have to go out on the mat by himself, with nothing more than moral support from his teammates, he has to have the courage to confront whoever might be in front of him. You do not have the luxury of backing down and over time a wrestler learns the more confident and assertive he is the better he (or she) will perform.
- Mental Strength: Just like with any other sport, if the opponent cheats or does something that is unsportsmanlike a disciplined wrestler is taught not to react. One important part of bullyproofing your child is teaching them not to react unless necessary. The coach from the high school I went to had a motto, “Always show class, never show your ass!” All that meant was not to react to bad behavior and prove yourself on the mat.
- Work Ethic: Wrestlers are notorious for their hard work if they want to succeed. This work ethic teaches resiliency and inner strength that sometimes children do not display. They are taught adversity in a safe environment that translates in to day to day living.
- Self Defense: I saved this one for last since it should also be the last resort. If a situation exists where your child has tried his or her hardest to either avoid, ignore or deflect the bullies in their life and they are forced to protect themselves from an attack, there are few sports or martial arts that do it better.
Wrestling is a grappling sport which means a child who gets his personal space violated will likely be less intimated. They are very used to their opponents being very close to them and they know how to react to them. Wrestling is also about speed, strength, endurance and technique. A decent wrestler is fully capable of not just avoiding a bully if they try to shove or grab them, they are also capable of putting them down on the floor in a helpless position if they need to.
Wrestling is also a core “must have” style for someone to succeed in Mixed Martial Arts. Mixed Martial arts is a sport with very limited rules. It is as realistically as close as you can get to a one on one no rules type street fight. Over the years it has been proven that if a fighter can control the range, he can control the fight. That is what wrestling does.
Trying to bully-proof your child can be very complicated. As a parent you want to help your child along without taking total control over their lives. In my opinion, one of the ways you can do that is by enrolling them in a wrestling program so they can learn the confidence, skill, work ethic and mental toughness it takes to avoid being a victim, teaching them how to deal with bullies, as well as becoming a successful adult.
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