Fantasy I Land

Does anyone remember the early days of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, when police officers would stand in front of your class and tell you dope is for dopes? It launched when I was in high school, and I had friends who would only attend the lectures stoned. It took years of research and a major shift in the program’s content before it became nominally effective at its goals of reducing youth drug use and gang violence. Could the new crop of bullying-prevention programs be the DARE of our age? Why, yes, they could.

Or they could be worse. According to a study of bullying-prevention programs in the Journal of Criminology, students are more likely to be bullied at schools with prevention programs than at those without them. Lead author Seokjin Jeong suggests that perhaps the programs provide a script for budding bullies to follow so that they don’t have to be creative. With all the attention given to bullying right now, I’m optimistic that we’ll eventually figure out how to intervene in a way that doesn’t just serve as an instructional video for jerks. One day our children will grow up in a world where the only sadists are handsome billionaires, and we can all agree what he looks like.

David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and  adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television, and Internet outlets.