Mother Comes up With Unusual Way to Stop Her Daughter From Bullying

Bullying stock photo Illustration - Shutterstock

A Utah mother came up with an unusual way to stop her stepdaughter from bullying another student.

Ally Olsen said she found out that her fiance’s fourth-grade daughter, Kaylee Lindstrom, was allegedly bullying another girl at her school in Utah over her clothes. She got a phone call from school officials who said Kaylee called them “ugly” and “sleazy.”

Olsen said that she took her stepdaughter to a thrift store, and told her she would play a game with her: pick out the ugliest clothes she could find.

Her stepdaughter then grabbed the ugly clothes off the racks, saying how hideous they looked.

Olsen then said Kaylee has to wear the thrift store clothes to school for the next two days, ABC News reported. After she wore the clothes, Kaylee was teased and bullied by others.

After her learning experience, she apologized to the girl she previously bullied.

“She needed to know how inappropriate she was behaving,” Olsen told ABC. “She said, ‘You’re ugly, you dress sleazy, you’re mean,’” Olsen said of her stepdaughter’s bullying.

Olsen and her father said they wanted to put her in the girl’s shoes.

“We really think if you felt how this little girl feels, you might have a little empathy for her,” Olsen said. “She learned exactly what we wanted her to learn. We couldn’t be happier.”

“We did it because we wanted our daughter to learn something very valuable that touched home and touched her heart,” Olsen said, per Fox13.

She added to KSTU that it was a good “moment for us to really teach her, this is right, this is wrong, which path you are going to take.”

But one expert said that such parenting techniques may not work.

“What happens with that is the person walks away at the end saying now I’m really angry, that was humiliating and now I’m angry,” Dr. Doug Goldsmith of The Children’s Center told KSTU. He said a more advisable way to instruct children is by having them volunteer at a place where there are homeless.

Bullying

The National Bullying Prevention Center says that one out of every four students, or 22 percent, report being bullied during the school year. It adds:

- 64 percent of children who were bullied did not report it; only 36 percent reported the bullying.

- More than half of bullying situations (57 percent) stop when a peer intervenes on behalf of the student being bullied.

- School-based bullying prevention programs decrease bullying by up to 25%.

- The reasons for being bullied reported most often by students were looks (55%), body shape (37%), and race (16%).

It added that “cyberbullying” is also on the rise, with about 20 percent of high school students in the U.S. reporting being bullied online.