A mother came up with a creative 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.
Bullying
According to Stop Bullying, a government group, 28 percent of students in the United States have experienced bullying while 70 percent of youth have seen bullying at school. Some 30 percent of respondents admitted to bullying in surveys, the group said. In one study, about 49 percent of students in grades 4 through 12 reported being bullied by other students at school at least once during the previous month.
“The most common types of bullying are verbal and social. Physical bullying happens less often. Cyberbullying happens the least frequently,” the group stated. “Most bullying takes place in school, outside on school grounds, and on the school bus. Bullying also happens wherever kids gather in the community. And of course, cyberbullying occurs on cell phones and online.”
The relationship between bullying and suicide is complex, according to Stop Bullying.
While the vast majority of young people who are bullied don’t commit or attempt suicide, Stop Bullying said, “research indicates that persistent bullying can lead to or worsen feelings of isolation, rejection, exclusion, and despair, as well as depression and anxiety, which can contribute to suicidal behavior.”
From The Epoch Times
