Bullying, especially when it occurs in young children, can have long-lasting and detrimental effects on one's mental health.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Buffalo set out to find a way to reduce bullying in young children. The team analyzed the effectiveness of a program called the Early Childhood Friendship Project (ECFP). The eight-week program incorporates puppets to help tell stories that address a different topic per week. Each story also presents a main developmental issue to the children, who are asked to help solve it together.
On top of the puppet story, the program also uses interventionists whose job is to reinforce and praise good behaviors within the classroom. The interventionists are required to be in the classroom for about three hours per week.
The researchers found that the program was effective at reducing relational bullying, which typically occurs in the form of exclusion with the purpose of hurting someone. In a classroom setting, an example of relational bullying would be when a group of children tells another child that he or she cannot play with them.
"We're seeing a significant effect for relational bullying that's quite notable - and it doesn't require a lot of time," Jamie Ostrov, an associate professor at UB, said. "You can go into these classrooms and with minimal interaction with the kids see relatively big returns on your investment."
The researchers also tested the program on their control group and found similar results.
"We saw from the first study that this was effective and we wanted all the children to receive the intervention," Ostrov said. "It wasn't ethical to say, 'you're in the control group so you don't get anything.'"
The team hopes that ECFP, which can be easily integrated into a school's curriculum, will be used frequently in the future when the program itself is finalized. They noted that in their previous research, they had also found that ECFP helped reduced aggression and peer victimization within the classroom.
"We still need more work before we can export this on a larger scale," Ostrov said. "But fundamentally, it won't require a lot of training and it can be done with one teacher in the classroom."
The study was published in the journal, School Psychology Review.
