New Partnership to Combat Bullying & Bias | Facing History & Ourselves
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New Partnership to Combat Bullying & Bias

Our new collaboration with Making Caring Common and The Choose Kindness Project aims to help educators and parents support teenagers’ social-emotional wellbeing.

In partnership with Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and with support from The Choose Kindness Project, Facing History & Ourselves is proud to launch a new collaborative campaign, Combating Bullying and Bias.

Launched at a moment when concerns about teen mental health are making headline news, this campaign is designed to help equip parents, caretakers, and other adults in supporting adolescents to develop their sense of identity, agency, and belonging.  Research shows that one of the contributing factors in the continuing teen mental health crisis is bullying. Taking a variety of forms, bullying can contribute to feelings of sadness and isolation, and be especially detrimental to young people’s sense of connectedness, safety, and confidence. Bystanders who witness bullying are also at increased risk for experiencing mental health issues, including depression and anxiety.

As with all of our work, our goals for the Combating Bullying and Bias campaign are centered on helping young people learn how to become upstanders who speak out against bigotry and hate. Together with our partners we hope this initiative can support teenagers in effectively responding when they experience or witness bullying, bias, or bigotry and mitigate the detrimental impact of these experiences on their mental health. 

To support this vision, we will publish downloadable parent resources, develop workshops, and create a webinar-based speaker series adapted from some of our leading classroom materials. These offerings will help equip parents to engage in open, honest discussions with their teens on issues around bullying, bias, isolation, and bigotry  – including how to identify and stand up to such occurrences while also building their capacity to empathize with and consider the perspectives of others.

In the first of our planned resources, our Current Events toolkit, we offer techniques for parents to help their teens process issues in the news, including those involving bigotry, and to help teens protect their mental health by developing healthy boundaries around their consumption of the news.

Current Events Toolkit

In this guide, parents of middle and high school students will find strategies for reflection, discussion, and more to engage with their children and help them process current events.

By providing strategies for reflection and discussion, this toolkit will help parents of middle and high school students navigate conversations around news and other content that their children may need support to understand. Parents will be guided through reflection on their own identities and lived experiences through questions such as, “What factors make up your identity (for example, race, religion, nationality, political beliefs) and how do these factors influence how you respond to different current events?”

In addition, the toolkit offers ways for parents to:

  • model for their teens empathy for people impacted by specific events in the news
  • help teens develop new media literacy skills, including how to determine which news sources are trustworthy and reliable
  • establish intentional moments to discuss current events and reflect together

Get more guidance on how to talk about current events with your teen with this free resource.

Access the Toolkit

About Making Caring Common

Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, supports families, educators, and communities in raising children who care for others and the common good, and who are committed to justice.

Visit their website to learn more.

About The Choose Kindness Project

The Choose Kindness Project is an alliance of 20+ of the nation’s leading nonprofit organizations that champion three major issue areas affecting children and teens: bullying prevention, intentional inclusion and youth mental wellness.

The Choose Kindness Project is dedicated to inspiring a more inclusive world where all young people feel empowered to be themselves and feel safe to create the futures they imagine.

 Visit their website to learn more.