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You can't, but you can make a point to tell your children, which is what I've done. You have to stop the cycle early, or it does become pervasive and nobody wins in the end, nobody. Exhibit A is the Columbine massacre. The kids were bullied until they finally snapped and a lot of people lost their lives because everybody around them failed at stopping it.

When my son told me he was being bullied, I showed him a few BJJ moves to help out, then I told him, "If someone wants to throw down, then do it, and always swing first. It doesn't matter if you win or not, you're going to get into trouble regardless. Don't wait for someone to make the first move."

A week later, I got called into the principals office about him fighting. I went in and read the principal the riot act. My son repeatedly told his teachers and other staff about what was going on and they did nothing. He broke the kids nose and then put him in an armbar (ala Rhonda Rousey) until the teacher came and broke it up. I told the principal he defended himself and did nothing wrong and his bully was lucky he didn't hyper-extend his elbow or worse.

He said after that all the bullying stopped and thanked me for giving him the courage to stand up to his bullies. I just endured it when I was his age, but I wanted to make my kids wouldn't have to go through what I did and were able to end the cycle.

Wow, this comment is really shocking to me. Wow, wow, wow. I hope your child turns out okay :/

Errr, one of the points of all this is to stand up to bullies, in this case in the tried and true fashion, and stop them before they push you too the breaking point. Helps that the vast majority of them, including the ones I've dealt with, get deterred real quickly when pain is on the menu, and often become somewhat friendly.

That only works if you go to decent school were people have things to loose. Otherwise someone might very well end up dead or in prison. Adults can't manage violence, don't expect kids to.

Well, adults ultimately manage violence with lethal force, which is essentially what you're saying.

However, I submit to you that all this is a vital and psychologically essential lesson for kids to learn: recognizing standard issue bullies and dealing with them per the above, and, ideally not too young, recognizing those for whom this won't work. Bullying won't stop after e.g. K-12, I myself had to use a credible threat of lethal force to stop an attempt to feloniously bully me in college, and while it ought to move out of the physical realm once you enter the "real world", bullies abound there as well.

Come to think of it, there was a dangerous, held back some so he was bigger than almost all of us, retarded boy who attended my school in 3rd grade plus or minus, who I treated as a potentially lethal threat, and never even thought to applied the treatment for normal bullies. Instead, that provided a lesson in gathering allies and all that.

What's so shocking about it? Have you ever been bullied? Ever had to fight someone?

"First, those "jocks" that get all the girls, have (generalizing here) other very serious problems, are often emotionally stunted, angry at their dads, or whatever."

I highly doubt that this is true.

Yeah, smells like an adolescent rationalization.

Anecdotal, but I would say in my experience its true. The jocks who got the gals in my teen youth have grown up to be quite the social misfits - jail time, drug abuse, kicked out of homes. This is a total generalization but its been a long-standing one: "nice guys finish last" .. etc.

>>> Wish I could tell all of this to my 14-year-old self.

I often think this about any number of things, and then I realize there were probably a lot of people in my life who were telling them to me, and I just didn't want to listen to them. Being 14 is really hard.

I am sure this is way far too late for most people on HN, but there is some useful advice that tends to work.

Usually, the most popular people can pick on a wide range of people and don't focus on any one person. It is the people in the lower middle that have fewer targets below them that get really mean. As strange as this sounds moving slightly up the hierarchy, but not to high is the best way to avoid lots of negative attention from any one person. Granted, this assumes there is nothing specifically unusual about someone.

PS: Sorry, if this comes off as victim baiting, but thinking of high school as a pack of chimps works surprisingly well.