He Will Sword You.

Little G [wielding his new foam sword]: "Nobody messes with me! 'Cept for my mama. 'Cause I love her. Anybody else messes with me and I will sword you!!"

Love this kid.

Common Questions People Ask About Homeschooling

Some of the most common questions I am asked as a homeschooling parent are: What does your day look like? Do you teach for as many hours as they teach in regular schools? Isn't it difficult? Do your kids respect you as teacher, or do they think they can get away with stuff because you're mom? Do they have recess? What do you do for gym class? How do you teach two grades at the same time? Do your kids still get up early? Do they 'go to school' in their pajamas? Well, I've finally put together a post to answer these questions!

Do you teach for as many hours as they [the teachers] teach in regular [public, bricks and mortar] schools?

No. And yes. Are my children sitting with pencil to paper for 6 hours per day in a highly-structured manner? No. But if I tried to quantify the hours they spend learning, it would add up to more than the typical school day. Because I am the one teaching them, I can slip relevant information into just about every aspect of their daily routines, and I often do. Baking is science and math. There is history all around us. Health is a part of our lives every day. And my children and I love to hula hoop, so we get lots of physical activity that way and count it toward our physical education hours. My husband and I will discuss what they have learned and delve deeper into history lessons or do flash card contests in the evenings or on weekends. I find a lot of great resources on YouTube (travel videos are a fun way to learn more about geography and world landscapes, for example). The whole world is a classroom without limits! Learning at home is a much different style of learning, and affords us a lot of flexibility. For us, flexibility means enrichment opportunities more than location or time.

Isn't it difficult?

It really isn't! I was a little nervous (okay, completely terrified) going into this adventure. However, I did a couple of years worth of researching various curriculum options and I feel extremely good about choosing K12. The curriculum is excellent and the support is very good. There is very little I don't love about K12.

In terms of keeping the kids focused, I really don't have a problem there. They love to learn, and I have been "teaching" my son since he was a baby because he has autism and a speech disorder. This is no different for him than teaching him sign language or doing his speech homework. There is a lot of reading in the K12 curriculum as well, and I have read to my children since before they were even born. It is a very good fit for us. My daughter did have a rough few days one week, but that's about it. I think it was more that she wasn't feeling well than anything else. As long as you already have rules and discipline, and you discuss with your child the responsibilities of learning at home, homeschooling should not be difficult - especially with a supportive structure like K12 has.

Do your kids respect you as teacher, or do they think they can get away with stuff because you're mom?

My children respect me as mom already, and all parents are teachers whether they homeschool or not. I always find myself telling other parents this, because it's so true; you are your child's first and most important teacher. The only things I ask that differ at all during learning hours are raising a hand during discussions (which my daughter does whether we're learning or not - and it's kind of funny), and there is a no electronics rule (except, of course, the computer).

Do they have recess?

Yes, they do! Indoors or outdoors, depending on the weather. Sometimes we go for a walk, sometimes they play a board game, and sometimes they combine recess and physical education and do some hooping or bike riding.

What do you do for gym class?

Lots of things! We do many of the things children would do in a bricks and mortar school, and a lot more. I try to involve my children in community sports when possible, we ride bikes, we hula hoop, they do sit-ups, squat jumps, jumping jacks, balloon chases, run races, do hopscotch challenges, play catch, jump rope, and much more. The possibilities are endless!

How do you teach two grades at the same time?

It's very easy. I work with one child while the other works independently. Also, since my son is in Kindergarten, but doing 1st and 2nd grade work, much of what I am teaching works well for both grades. This makes it much easier for me, but I think we would do just fine even with a much greater grade level difference. It's all about time management and finding a groove that works for you. It takes a few weeks when you're just starting out to find that groove, but things go surprisingly well once you do.

Do your kids still get up early?

Usually, but now I don't have to worry about a rough morning if they have a cute holiday movie on TV until 10PM! My daughter used to catch the bus shortly after 8AM. She used to wake up at 7AM to be ready, and now she wakes up closer to 8:30AM. However, we're usually starting our school day around the same time the public schools are because their transportation time is our breakfast time.

Do your kids 'go to school' in their pajamas?

Not always, but sometimes! And sometimes upside down in pajamas!


They both like to start the day in pajamas, for the most part. Unless we have something fun planned, in which case they want to get dressed up before I even have breakfast started.

Do you have questions? Feel free to ask! If there's one thing I love to talk about, it's definitely homeschooling!

New York Times Targets K12, Online Schools In Severely Biased Article

Since we began learning at home as a family, my daughter has had a couple of rough days. Call it a rough week, even. But compared to having her come home with injuries from bullies, having her self-esteem chipped at on a daily basis, and the fact that she started to develop tummy aches about getting on the bus each day when she used to grin ear to ear every morning anticipating the day she would be old enough to ride that bus to school, I'd call our rough week a mere bump in the road. As for my son, he hasn't had one day of learning at home that I could consider rough. He craves knowledge and literally begs me to continue teaching on weekends, a request I am happy to indulge. I can make choices about the children my children associate with. I'm aware of what they are learning and I can always easily slip curriculum-enriching things into our day. We don't have homework in the traditional sense, so our evenings are family time instead of a mad dash to finish a mountain of homework, take baths, throw down some dinner, and get into bed. And academically, they are excelling. The experience has made us all happier.

Homeschooling has been a wonderful option for us, and I can't say enough good things about K12. But apparently, people feel threatened by school choice (or is it the loss of funds for their districts?) and feel the need to attack online schools. A recent New York Times article was a catalyst for some major misconceptions about K12 and similar schools. I, and many others, took great offense to how K12 and the families enrolled in their school were portrayed.

My daughter attended a bricks and mortar school for two arduous years. While I will quickly admit that her classroom teachers were both excellent - even exceptional, I was profoundly unimpressed by everything else. Perhaps most disturbing was having a school system telling me how - and if - I could parent my own child for the great majority of the day, five days a week, while they failed to do even a mediocre job of protecting her or following their own policies. The lack of predictability, reliability, and safety were major concerns. The only thing predictable about sending my child out that door each day was that, at some point, I was going to get a call about some kid doing some thing to my child. Again.

I'm quite certain that having parents regaining control of their children's lives scares some people in this country to their very cores. Independent thinkers? Oh my. People like that are so much more difficult to control and manipulate, and they tend not to believe everything they're told. They ask questions. That could be bad for those who wish to maintain control over the masses.

The New York Times article, Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools throws out a real golden nugget of revelation with the statement, "Kids mean money." Wow, really? Anyone with a functioning brain above their stem realizes this as fact, but let's examine how this affects people on a personal level. The article attempts to make it sound like this is some kind of proof that K12 has profits over kids in mind, but I challenge any parent in any school district to take a good hard look and tell me if that isn't true for bricks and mortar schools - to a much greater degree. At public school, my child contributed thousands of dollars each year just by existing there. To her personally, that translated into a sub-standard school environment, heavily-used books and materials, and parents contributing a lot of time and money from our own pockets. On the other hand, I enrolled my children in K12, and I had 100 pounds of brand new school supplies delivered to my door. Free. Yes, free. We paid nothing. I had to go buy a bookshelf to dedicate to just the books, CDs, and DVDs alone, and I had to clear an entire cabinet in the kitchen for all of the science materials, paints, clay, and other materials. And comparatively speaking, my children cost taxpayers much less as homeschoolers than they would if they had continued to attend our local public schools.

The article presents another epic failure of an argument with this little gem: "Current and former staff members of K12 Inc. schools say problems begin with intense recruitment efforts that fail to filter out students who are not suited for the program, which requires strong parental commitment and self-motivated students." Here's a newsflash: any form of education requires strong parental commitment. Whether a child is attending a bricks and mortar school, an online school, a private school, or a traditional homeschool, parental involvement is the number one factor in a child's success. Uninvolved parents who do not participate in their child's education can turn the brightest child with the greatest potential for success into an academic failure with zero motivation, and it happens all the time in public schools.

I'm quite tired of parents being painted as morons who are incapable of contributing to their children's academic success. An Agora teacher paints a profoundly biased picture with the statement, "When you have the television and the Xbox and no parental figure at home, sometimes it’s hard to do your schoolwork." First of all, we don't even own a game console. Second, my children have never been left alone in their lives. And finally, K12 kids are assessed regularly. If they are not making it, there is accountability. We are responsible for making sure our children are progressing; there is not the huge disconnect portrayed in the article. Further, they quote a mother, Mrs. Ubiarco, as saying, "I called the teacher the other day to find out what a simple predicate is...She said it’s the verb. I said why don’t they just say that?" To this I say, wow. You needed to call a teacher for that? Try Google. Better yet, that handy little teacher's guide you get with every course might be helpful, too. The New York Times apparently left out all of the many successful examples of K12 students and found a handful of disgruntled teachers, and a few parents who use videogames to babysit their children, don't know how to tell their child to put the iPod away, and manage their time very poorly to represent our online school. Bias much?

Of our attendance requirements, the same Agora teacher who made the Xbox comment said, "Students need simply to log in to be marked present for the day." While it is true that K12 is not sending someone to the door of each and every homeschooled student each day to be sure each child has pencil to paper, the academic progress and assessments speak for themselves. A child who is not "attending" regularly is not going to meet standards, plain and simple.

And then, because you can't have any good, irrational anti-homeschool argument without bringing the topic of "socialization" into it, the deputy superintendent of Memphis City Schools, Irving Hamer, offered the following: “The early development of children requires lots of interaction with other children for purposes of socialization, developing collaboration and teamwork, and self-definition." Fascinating. Children couldn't possibly garner these skills from, say, Scouts, homeschool co-ops, neighborhood children, friends of the family, siblings, K12's field trips and other opportunities for social development, community sports or classes, or anywhere other than public school? I'd like to inquire as to when children are obtaining these wonderful social skills in school; would it be on the playground, the school bus, or in the lunch room? As far as my personal experience tells me, those are basically the only times children are doing any socializing in bricks and mortar schools - and it is largely unsupervised and where most bullying takes place. Ah, but Mr. Hamer's pompous assertions probably shouldn't surprise me, since a quick Google search revealed that he handles people who disagree with his policies by telling them to "go flip burgers". Nice. I think I'll pass on any social advice he proffers, particularly since Mr. Hamer's degree is in education and not child psychology.

The article (yes, it's quite lengthy) goes on to say that schools like K12 have "aggressive recruitment campaigns". I prefer to view them as awareness campaigns, which are rather necessary with anti-homeschool propaganda such as the New York Times article that prompted this blog post. K12 and schools like it do try to provide many informative opportunities for parents who have been brainwashed into believing that they cannot contribute much to their child's education beyond buying school clothes and supplies, and joining the PTA. Parents need to become aware of how much they really mean to their children in terms of learning and education. I cannot begin to count how many times people say to me, upon learning that I homeschool two advanced learners, "I could never do that." My response is always the same, "Yes, you absolutely could." Any parent with the time and desire to teach their child can teach their child. K12 has amazing teacher support. You are never alone. But public schools do everything they can to convince you that homeschooled children will be socially-awkward, poorly educated nitwits who will never go on to college. K12 has students go on to Harvard. But those students were not included in the Times article. I'd laugh at how utterly ridiculous the Times article is, if I didn't know so many people really believe that.

Is K12 perfect? No. But it's lightyears ahead of bricks and mortar schools in every way, in my opinion. Nothing is perfect. This is a relatively new concept and there will be bumps. Overall, I think this is a wonderful thing. There will always be naysayers who don't like change or who are just too uninformed to make any kind of judgment about this type of education. As for the New York Times, I'm not (nor was I ever) sure why people give that rag so much credibility. The reporting is poor and biased, the stories are highly sensationalized, and I wouldn't use that publication to line my cat's litter pan.

Celebrities and Bullying

The new fashionable trend in Hollywood these days is the statement, "I was bullied in school, too." At first, this appeared to be a good thing. When celebrities talk, people listen. But now? Now people are saying to themselves, "Meh, everyone gets bullied. So what?" This celebrity bullying bandwagon has served to take the anti-bullying movement, which had gone from meh, everyone gets bullied to a growing awareness of a serious problem, right back to meh.

When I was dealing with some serious bullying issues as a kid, my mother told me a billion times how this celebrity was ridiculed about big lips, and that ones was teased for her height. "But look at them now! They got the last laugh," she would say. Thing was, I had exactly zero interest in celebrities, being a celebrity, or anything celebrities did. I didn't care what they were wearing, what they looked like, how much money they had, or how many people wanted to be like them. I never understood people who fawned over celebrities, and I still don't. So my mother's well-intended sharing this information with me basically accomplished nothing more than convincing me that she had no idea what I was going through and no clue who I was as a person. At all.

While I am probably a statistically significant exception to the rule on my opinion of celebrities, or lack thereof, I realize these idols do have the power to influence parents and young people. I'm glad they are trying to do something, even if it is just to look fashionable. Thing is, if getting teased about my name was my biggest issue, I wouldn't call it bullying. I want to hear from the celebrity who was bullied to the point their life was significantly altered, or they actually attempted suicide over it. Those celebrities exist, but they are few. And the impact of severe bullying tends to be lifelong; the shame of repeated abuse over years and years sticks with a person to the point they may be unwilling to share, even to help someone else. That is the sad, scary reality for many children and teens these days.

I have been thankful beyond words more times than I can count that I didn't have to grow up in the age of the internet, cell phones, texting, cell phone cameras, and so forth. It is the introduction of these technologies that makes it more critical than ever for bullying prevention to be implemented by everyone caring for children at every age and in every part of a child's life. Parents, teachers, school administrators, and individuals working in the school transportation departments all need to come together to make and enforce anti-bullying policies. Bullying is extremely serious, and it goes so far beyond name-calling or taking someone's lunch money. Children can be cruel, and teachers can be bullies, accomplices, or perpetrators as well. Childhood should be a time of innocence and healthy development. Bullying, abuse by one's peers or teachers, can destroy a child's chance at having that innocence or healthy development, and it can ruin their chances of academic success as well.

This topic is easy to turn away from if you are not directly affected. But don't. We shouldn't allow ourselves to become numb to the pain and suffering children are enduring on a daily basis when bullies turn their school days into a terrifying, demoralizing, abusive nightmare. Forget celebrities, because they make it easy to forget the lives ruined by bullying. The suicides. The high school drop outs. The ones who might have found the cure for cancer, who instead gave up and wanted nothing more to do with education because they associated learning with pain and misery and could never trust people again. The ones living with nightmares, even as adults, because of their tormented childhood years. Bullying is no less devastating than any other form of child abuse, and it absolutely must stop now. The only way that happens is if we all come together and stand against bullying. There is no excuse for abuse.

Why K12?

The K12 page featured the following question this morning:

Finish this sentence: The reason our family chose online school for our educational needs is ...

I love answering this question, because we all feel really happy with our experience thus far. Homeschooling my children was something I gave a bit of consideration to from the moment I found out I was expecting, though I wasn't entirely certain it was for us. For starters, with the exception of being an assistant to my Psychology professor during First Year Seminars at Penn State, I basically had no teaching experience at all - and what little I did have wasn't very relatable to teaching young children. I realized that most homeschooling families probably didn't have parents with teaching degrees, either, but I didn't even have the benefit of personally knowing someone who homeschooled. The extent of my experience with this type of learning was based purely in stereotypical viewpoints and jokes made on television shows.

As my daughter neared the end of preschool years, I felt immense trepidation about putting her into the public school system. I'm aware of the growing epidemic of bullying, my children's quirks, and how those issues might not mesh so well. Since education is a very high priority for me, and my children both love to learn, my second greatest fear was that negative school experiences could ruin that for them. But we tried it, both because Reezle had done so well in her mainstream preschool and because she expressed great enthusiasm about going to Kindergarten and riding the big yellow school bus. And sadly, and one might also say predictably, problems emerged before the year was half through. Academically, she excelled. Socially, she did well, but still managed to be a frequent victim of bullying. It got to the point I was afraid every time the phone rang during school hours because I dreaded the principal's voice on the other end telling me which kid hurt my daughter this time and how.

It became evident that homeschooling was due some additional consideration, particularly since also struggled deeply with the massive disconnect fostered by the traditional public school system. I wanted to be more directly involved in my children's education experience, especially since I always had been involved in their learning and know how to work within their different (er, wildly different?) learning styles. Both of my children are advanced learners, and I wanted them to have a rich educational experience. I didn't feel the public schools could provide it adequately, nor did I agree with the fact that gifted programs didn't even begin until grade 3. Furthermore, with my son's various challenges (speech, sensory, autism), I knew there could never be the type of one-on-one interaction that would allow him to thrive the way I knew he was capable of.

I began researching various curricula available to determine if there would be a good fit for our family. K12 kept popping up in my searches, so I decided to look into what they offered. From the start, I was really impressed. The curriculum was exceptional compared to all the others I had looked into. There were options to buy the curriculum or enroll in an online, teacher-guided virtual academy. Right then, I knew this was exactly what we needed; I could provide my children with an excellent curriculum while also have the safety net, so to speak, of lesson plans, experienced teacher contacts, and technical support. The unbelievably awesome bonus? We received over 100 pounds of school books, materials, and supplies...absolutely 100% free. I must have saved a fortune, which freed up money to enrich our curriculum even further.

K12 gives my children the opportunity to work at their own pace and seek out enrichment and curriculum enhancement opportunities or explore in greater depth their own areas of interest. They love learning in the comfort of their own home and we all love the freedom we have to hold "class" anywhere we choose. I no longer have to worry about what kind of peer-perpetrated abuse my child has been subjected to every time the phone rings. If we miss bedtime by an hour and sleep in because of it, we simply work an hour longer. We don't concern ourselves with sick days, because they won't miss anything. And it seems the list of reasons we love this program just keeps growing over time.

So, on this last day of November 2011, I am thankful for having the opportunity to homeschool my children, and for the outstanding curriculum offered through K12. (I also highly recommend it to anyone looking at alternatives to traditional schools!)

Learning and Language

Teaching my son is ridiculously easy most of the time. He loves to learn, absorbs information like a little sponge, and is advanced enough in his math and language arts skills to help his sister when she gets stuck on something. Only rarely do we encounter any difficulties, and when we do it is always in language arts.

Little G's challenges in language arts are not due to the fact that the material is beyond him, or that he has any difficulty with comprehension; he is a year ahead of his peers. The challenge we face is directly related to his communication disorder. Our sticking points have been with getting him to understand when a sentence is a command, a question, an exclamation, or a telling sentence. More recently, he has difficulty with the positions of letters in certain spelling words. Based on these two challenges, I have realized that (a) my son does not rely on the sound of a person's voice for his information, but instead interprets what he hears as-is using logical cues, and (b) the way his brain processes the sounds he hears when a word is spoken to him (dictation for spelling words) sometimes results in him having the correct letters but putting them in the incorrect order. Since his earliest expressions of spoken language came out flipped in an almost identical manner, this is not a surprise at all.

Visually, Little G does great with spelling words. If it is something he has read in the past, he can spell it almost without fail. Similarly, if he is skilled at sounding out words - not in the phonics sense, but the actual correct spellings based on the rules of English and grammar he is familiar with from experience. Because of his speech disorder and his inability to make the thoughts in his brain form coherent speech on demand, especially when he is experiencing negative emotions (sadness, frustration), I spent a great deal of time teaching him sign language and handwriting so he had other communication options. We have been working on non-speech communication since we was 2 years old, and he has picked up an incredible amount in the past 4 years. He's gifted, no doubt, but I think his need to communicate helped.

We haven't seen his speech therapist in about a year, but she was absolutely wonderful. Her understanding of the various things which can affect speech acquisition and language went, in my opinion, far above and beyond what would be expected of any therapist. It was clear that her work was not simply a paycheck, but something she was called to do in life. Several times since our school year began, I have wished I could ask her questions about these language aspects of G's learning. I hesitated, knowing how much she already has on her plate, especially since my son is no longer part of that center. But finally this afternoon I thought, what the heck, why not? The worst she could do is refuse to talk to me, though I didn't think she would. So I waited until the end of the day, when I knew there would be no more appointments, and I called. She was just as kind and helpful as ever, and gave me a few great ideas to try with Little G. I will be starting them tomorrow. I got everything together after the kids went to bed tonight and I'm looking forward to finding out how this works (I will explain in a later post). She told me I could give her a call again if I had other questions, and I thanked her sincerely.

It was so nice that someone who owed us nothing at this point still cared enough to offer a few minutes of her time and some helpful suggestions. I've become used to the type of people who wash their hands and don't offer so much as a backwards glance the moment their necessary involvement is done.

In other Little G academic news, he knocked out about a full unit's worth of math in the past two days, and my Kindergartner is now just about where first graders (who started this course material in August) are, despite beginning 5-6 weeks after them. I am super proud of him!

My little Reezle girl has been up to some very cool things recently as well, and I will be sharing soon.

Bullying and Bullicide: A National Epidemic

According to the Youth Suicide Prevention Program, 1 in 10 high school students report at least one suicide attempt, and about 1 in 4 has seriously considered it. Let that resonate for a moment. Think about your typical high school classroom of approximately 20 students. Two of them have actually made an attempt to end their lives. The statistics are even more dismal for LGBT youth, 30% of whom report having attempted suicide at least once in the past year.



Ashlynn Conner, a smart, beautiful 10 year-old honor student who aspired to be a veterinarian when she grew up, made headlines last week. It wasn't for her academic success or achievement, or the type of news clipping she might frame and look back on through the years; after enduring bullying for two years and being told by her mother that she could not be homeschooled, Ashlynn decided to end her own life. While every story of a bullied child turning to suicide as an option is devastating, this one has left me chilled to the core. She was a little girl. Ashlynn was just two years older than my own daughter. I try to wrap my head around the idea of a child so young carrying such a heavy burden on her shoulders that she went as far as to end her life. No child deserves that. Her story has made me more determined than ever to do what I can to stand against bullying and encourage others to do the same.

Another young girl, 14 year-old Cheyanne of Ohio, endured verbal abuse and bullying by her teacher and teacher aid. What makes this even more troubling is that Cheyanne is developmentally disabled and these adults were the ones responsible for her education and safety during the school day.

While my own children are not in a bricks and mortar school, and some might think it would be easy for me to turn my back on the problem happening in public schools, I realize it is up to all of us to come together and turn this epidemic around. The effects of bullying can be lifelong, life-altering, or even life-ending. As the adults in this society, we all have the responsibility of ensuring the safety of our children. Just because bullying is a form of abuse perpetrated by other children, it is no more acceptable to ignore it than it would be to ignore obvious abuse of a child by an adult. Abuse is abuse, and it scars just the same. Too many people choose to turn away from this epidemic until it affects them personally, and saying nothing is essentially a quiet acceptance and granting of permission to the perpetrators of bullying; bullies realize that there are no guaranteed consequences for their actions, because most of it goes unpunished.

Not every parent can take their child out of public schools, and really, they should not need to. My daughter, a kind, compassionate child who cannot comprehend why all people cannot just be friends, was a victim of bullying during Kindergarten and first grade at our local elementary school. She was verbally harassed, spat on, and pelted in the face with snowballs to the point of injury. Responses appeared to be more to placate than to solve the actual problem. The district loosely followed its own guidelines on handling the bullying, and I suspect that the less than optimal results we got were only as good as they were because of my determined persistence.

I do not entirely blame the schools, however. Bullying has long been viewed as a fact of life for school-age children, and the extremely broad spectrum of types and degrees of bullying behavior allows even more disconnect because people tend to assume most bullying is of the garden variety and much less severe and impactful than it actually is.

So what are we to do? First and foremost, prevention starts at home; after all, parents have the greatest impact on their children. Sadly, even concerned parents too often consider bullying a fact of school life or a "harmless" rite of passage. Statistics on bullicide, suicide resulting from bullying, say otherwise. And there are the parents who believe that their child should become the bully, which will protect him or her by default. There is also the growing threat of technology as a bullying tool, which is like giving bullies super powers. It is more important than ever to take every preventive measure we can. Lives depend on it, as Ashlynn and so many others illustrate.

And yet, in some places right here in the United States, we're going backwards. Michigan's senate recently passed legislation called Matt's Safe School Law, which actually allows bullying for religious or moral reasons. This means that a bully can excuse his or her abuse of another peer as long as it can be justified within the parameters of supposed morality, as defined by the new legislation. In response to this, Michigan Democratic Senate Leader Sen. Gretchen Whitmer said, "This is worse than doing nothing."

If we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem. There is no middle ground. If we pretend this doesn't exist, if we ignore it because it has not touched our lives personally or we hope our children will outgrow this phase, we are just as guilty as the bullies perpetrating the abuse. We are the example, and we are the solution. Schools are responsible for the children in their halls and classrooms and on their playgrounds for a substantial portion of the day. No child should be terrified to go to school, or end up robbed of a decent education because their school days make them sick with anxiety and fear. Likewise, parents cannot expect the schools to shoulder all of the responsibility for properly "socializing" their children. This is a joint effort, and I cannot stress enough the importance of creating a safe environment for our children to grow and learn. The effects of bullying can last a lifetime.

Talk. Whether you are dealing with a bullying situation already underway, or you are trying to prevent one, talking to your child is key.

Don't judge. Even if you think you aren't judging, you might be. Don't ever tell your child that bullying is "no big deal", or that they should be quick enough to fight back. By doing this, you diminish their experience and fail to fully understand what they are going through. This could burn the bridge of communication between you.

Listen. Once bullying starts, listening is more important than talking. If you are busy telling your child that bullying is a part of life or that "it's not a big deal", you are completely invalidating your child's experience and missing critical details that could potentially save your child's life. Hear them out. Ask them what they would like to change, and how they might like you to help them. Create a dialogue by asking more questions than you try to answer. And make sure you are listening attentively. Listening with your back to your child while you do the dishes is not listening.

Know your school district's bullying policies. Be familiar with them so you know your rights in the event you need to know your rights. Most student policies are listed on district websites and are easily accessible to the parents and students in the district.

Consider joining the PTA/PTO and raising the issue of bullying prevention, or go further and try to get a group of parents together to start a school anti-bullying program.

Encourage your school district to adopt a program where children learn social skills. With autism spectrum disorders being diagnosed at an increasing rate, there are many children who need additional help with social skills even if their diagnosis does not qualify them for special education or other school-based interventions. In fact, all children can benefit from being taught social skills. We can no more expect that putting children together in a group will prepare them to do well socially than we can expect that putting them in a kitchen with unprepared foods will teach them how to cook like a professional chef. Guidance must be provided. If children cannot cope socially, neither can they learn or succeed academically.

Know that bullying starts shockingly young. Don't dismiss a child who says she is being bullied in preschool. It does happen, and it can be a traumatic way to begin one's school years. Having confidence and support during those early years is critical to how your child will view the rest of their school years and education in general.

To learn more about bullying, especially in the age of technology, I encourage you to watch Bullying: Words Can Kill, a CBS News 48 Hours Special