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Thank you for the A2A.I competed in taekwondo in the Amateur Athleitc Union (AAU) as a beginner and intermediate color belt. They hold tournaments all over the United States, culminating in a national tournament each summer in Ft Lauderdale, Fl. Competition is held in forms, point and Olympic style sparring, breaking, and team forms. It usually costs about $75 to compete in two events at a tournament (plus a one time AAU registration fee- I think it is around $25). Divisions are formed by age and rank.I enjoyed competing, Frequently I had to go against younger students— there just weren’t that many adults that competed… usually I waited all day to compete and only got to do one match for forms and one sparring match. I’m not sure if that was rank specific or just age specific to this region. It was a fun experience that would be even better if more adults participated.

Depression, suicide attempts, physical health problems, and reduced academic achievement; these are just a few of the negative effects bullying can have on children, according to many studies.But what happens when those children grow into adults? Does childhood bullying lead to struggles in adulthood?That’s the question tackled by researchers from the University of Warwick and Duke University Medical Center, whose results were published recently in the journal Psychological Science, 2 to 3 years ago.They began to follow participants in North Carolina at ages 11 to 13. The kids were assessed every year until age 16, and once again as young adults, at ages 19 to 26. All in all, 1,273 people participated in every stage of the study.In childhood and adolescence, participants and their parents reported if they had been bullied or had bullied others in the previous three months. Researchers sorted those who experienced bullying into three categories: victims, bullies, and bully-victims (kids who had been both bullies and victims at some point in time).As it turned out, victims outnumbered bullies in the study by three to one (305 vs. 100). But the largest portion of study participants formed a fourth category: Those who claimed to have had no experience at all with bullying (789 participants). Bullies were mostly boys, but victims could be either girls or boys.Then, at the young adult stage, the researchers looked at factors like physical and mental health, risky behaviors, wealth, and social relationships and they investigated whether the participants had acquired criminal records. When the researchers matched childhood bullying with adult outcomes, they discovered four key insights:1. Bullying is most toxic for those who were both bullies and victims.“Bully-victims in school had the worst health outcomes in adulthood,” write the researchers, “with markedly increased likelihood of having been diagnosed with a serious illness, having been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, regular smoking, and slow recovery from illness.”2. Bullies might be more likely to engage in risky or illegal behaviors in adulthood.When they grew up, bullies were more likely to have been convicted of felonies and to have abused drugs, and they actually tended to be poorer and lonelier than their former victims. However, when researchers controlled for childhood hardships like divorce or psychiatric problems, they found that a bully’s situation didn’t look quite as dim. In other words, bullies tended to have more troubled childhoods—and that may explain both their bullying and the greater likelihood of engaging in illegal behaviors down the road.3. Victims tended to be more successful—but less healthy—than bullies in adulthood.In general, victimized kids grew up to do better than the kids who bullied them. They made more money, had more friends, and were much, much less likely to be convicted of a crime—but they still did worse than those who weren’t bullied at all. And their mental and physical health tended to be worse than everyone else. (When researchers controlled for other childhood hardships, the risks for both victims and bully-victims did not change.)4. All three groups involved in bullying did worse than those who were not.Overall, kids who were touched by bullying—as bullies, victims, or bully-victims—ended up with less education and less money than those who said they had escaped bullying altogether. Kids who encountered bullying in any way also struggled more with social relationships than those were had no experience with bullying.Thirty-eight percent of the 421 victims and bully-victims were chronically bullied; meaning that it kept happening throughout childhood. This subset often struggled the most, being poorer, less educated, and more isolated than everyone else.Taken together, these results show how a child can be affected by bullying throughout his or her life—but also reveals that a child can suffer from bullying on both sides of the spectrum, as victim and perpetrator.“Being bullied is not a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up,” conclude the authors, “but throws a long shadow over affected children’s lives.”

“What should you do if your child throws their toys at you during a tantrum?”Catch & Keep.My four-year old son once threw his favourite car at me in anger. I caught the car and put it on a shelf. He looked at me and said, “Give me back my car.”“Your car?”He pointed. “That’s mine.”“Not anymore,” I said. “I caught it, I keep it.”“But that’s my car.”“If you didn’t want to lose it, why did you throw it to me?”“I threw it at you.”I frowned. “At me? Why?”“I’m angry at you.”“That’s no reason to throw a car at me.”He blinked. “But I’m angry at you.”“I heard you the first time. Did you hear what I said?”“I want my car back.”“Not before you understand that you cannot throw things at people just because you’re angry.”I could see he was still angry, but he didn’t throw another car. He stomped off and I listened as he went up the stairs and to his room. I left him alone. All was quiet for a while, then he came back down and walked up to me.“How do I get my car back?”“By apologising for throwing your car at me and promising not to do that again. Not to me, not to anyone else.”He nodded. “I’m sorry.”I took the car from the shelf, handed it back to him. He looked at the car, then at me and said, “What if I’d kept throwing things at you?”“I would keep everything until you run out of things to throw.”“What if I break something of yours?”“On purpose?”“Because I’m angry.”I shrugged. “I’d sell your toys to buy the thing you had broken.”“What if it was really expensive?”“I’d use the money from future toys.”“You’d do that?”“Yes. Aren’t you glad you promised never to throw things at me anymore?” I took down a strike shield I use in my self defence courses and crouched before him. “Hit this shield. Throw all your anger into the punch.”He hit the strike shield and I encouraged him to hit it again and again until he could barely lift his arms. Then I gave him something to drink and told him that next time he was angry, to ask me to take down the shield so he could punch his frustration into submission.Children need an outlet for their anger. Just make sure it’s a healthy one.Edited to add:Many commenters argue that giving the angry/frustrated child the opportunity to punch a strike shield would foster violent behaviour. In my experience, venting anger and frustration in a healthy way through training in martial arts actually diminishes the anger and decreases the chances of volatile and violent behaviour.One of the worst things you can do is teach children that anger is inappropriate and should be surpressed. When children learn to suppress their negative emotions, they will build up until they cannot be contained anymore and the child will probably vent their anger in an unhealthy fashion against an unwitting victim.Like it or not, violence and anger is in our nature. To harness destructive powers, it’s better to give them the proper outlet than to ignore or suppress them.I’m a Pre-Conflict Control instructor, teaching conflict resolution, assertiveness, situational awareness, and physical self-defence, mainly to adults who have never learned how to properly deal with their negative emotions in childhood.If you teach your child to suppress their negative emotions, you are doing them a disservice, which can turn out to become harmful and destructive when they’re older.Edited to add:Commenters tell me that hitting a strike shield doesn’t help the child to understand their anger, so “it’s not a solution”.No, it’s not a solution and it was never intended to be one. It’s an outlet. A means of expressing the anger in a healthy fashion. It’s not about understanding the anger. Understanding comes later, when the toddler develops into a more cerebral person. And even understanding is not always a solution. There is no solution to anger, because an emotion cannot be ‘solved’, but with understanding, one might learn to control the emotion, so the emotion can be expressed in a healthy fashion without causing harm or injury.And yet another edit to add:Some commenters talked about a study that concluded that venting anger only begets anger. When I asked for a link to that study, this link was provided. I read the paper on that study, but what the commenters failed to realise was that the study was not on children who are dealing with overwhelming emotions, but on college students with anger management issues (that should’ve been resolved when they were still toddlers). And I have some issues with their ‘scientific’ method:“In the present study, 600 college students (300 men, 300 women) were first angered by another participant who criticized an essay they had written. In fact, there was no other participant. Next, participants were randomly assigned to rumination, distraction, or control groups. Participants in the rumination group hit a punching bag as long, as hard, and as many times as they wanted to. While they hit the bag, they were told to think about the other participant who had criticized their essay. For a visual aid, they were shown a photo ID of a same-sex col- lege student described as the “other participant” on a 15- inch computer monitor. Participants in the distraction group also hit a punching bag as long, as hard, and as many times as they wanted to. While they hit the bag, they were told to think about becoming physically fit. As a visual aid, they were shown a photo ID of a same-sex athlete from a health magazine on a 15-inch computer monitor. Participants in the control group did not hit the punching bag. Instead, they sat quietly for a couple minutes while the experimenter supposedly worked on the other participant’s computer. No attempt was made to reduce the anger of participants in the control group. Anger was measured using a mood form. Aggression was measured by allowing participants to blast their provocateur with loud and long noises through a pair of headphones on a competitive reaction time task. Catharsis theory would predict the lowest levels of anger and aggression among participants in the rumination condition. Cognitive neoassociation theory would predict the exact opposite results.”Source: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bbushman/PSPB02.pdfSo we manipulate immature college students who can be angered by criticism into physically lashing out virtually against the person that angered them and we wonder why their anger is not diminished?This study is irrelevant to my answer for several reasons:My answer is about angry children, not angry adults (yes, I consider college-age people to be adults). Why do I make this distinction? Children are born selfish (a baby cries whenever they are hungry or in discomfort) and learn through age 0–12 how to regulate their emotions. All emotions can be overwhelming, but anger is the most destructive. Adults who are quick to anger are considered immature for a reason. Maturity shows in the ability to deal with anger and frustration — and it’s clear from current society that many adults have not learned to harness their emotions. (I’m not even going into the subjective part of the study, using only 600 college students from just 1 particular American University, which makes this study’s conclusion hardly globally applicable.)Another thing about the study is similar to some parent comments on how they handled their children’s angry tantrums — some parents when confronted with angry children told their child to go to their room and not come down until ready to join the group again, and a similar thing happens in the study: the participants are isolated in a room with a punching bag and either an image of the offending party or an image of a fit athlete, and then secretly measured how they hard they punch the bag.The problem is that both the way these parents deal with their angry children and the participants in the study bears no relation to how I dealt with my child. I didn’t send my kid to his room to punch a bag (I did allow him to stomp off to his room to cool off, but that was by his own volition), and when I taught him how to us the strike shield, I stayed with him and talked with him while I let him vent his anger in a controlled way on a strike shield that I held.I also didn’t tell him to imagine the strike shield to be me or any other person, but merely a strike shield intended to absorb the violent energy of his punches without harm.In short, I guide my child’s anger into a controlled outlet, explaining to him that mature people don’t hit other people or throw things at people, but learn how to control their emotions as violent outbursts are not allowed when they become adults.I have two children. My son, who was four in this answer and is now thirteen, and my daughter who is now nine. My daughter is more temperamental than my son. I did the strike shield with her as well, and she went to kickboxing at age 6–7, hip-hop dancing age 8, and is now at 9 training in kung-fu. I also take her to park for sword training — she has a wooden sword that whistles if she uses it correctly.Result: both my children are regarded as emotionally mature for their ages. They rarely if ever get into altercations and never get into fights. My daughter has been considered by her teacher to be a mediator — many children who don’t see eye-to-eye play peacefully together with my daughter. She’s also very strategic, bringing the classroom bully home one afternoon after school and showing him the judomats in my living room and the rack with swords for ‘fight training’, with the result that the bully knows not to bully her.So, despite the comments of some parents citing an irrelevant study, I stay with my (expert) opinion as a Pre-Conflict Control instructor that using controlled venting methods like physically beating up strike shields — especially with children — help in harnessing overwhelming emotions and turn children into more balanced adults.