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aggression is intrinsic to status and escalates with increases in peer status until the pinnacle of the social hierarchy is attained.”

Children from single-parent homes, and those with less educated parents, are no more apt to bully than kids with married and learned parents. African-Americans and other minorities show the same rates of bullying as their white counterparts.

The popular notion of bullies as sullen social outcasts who come from broken homes is a myth.

What adults call bullying kids call drama.

Cyber-bullying is just an extension of what’s happening in the classrooms, halls, and cafeteria

online cruelty merely makes visible what kids are doing in person behind the backs of adults.

ust another way for kids to express hostility towards targets they’ve already gone after—or are in retaliation against those who have attacked them in school.

Kids don’t intervene because doing so would jeopardize their own standing, they lack the tools to assist, and because they don’t think it will help anyway.

Adolescents are fixated on their social standing, and anything that jeopardizes their fragile position will be avoided.

students receive scant training on how to help in such a way that it won’t backfire.

“Asking students to be empowered and responsible bystanders is tantamount to telling them to be good readers or safe drivers without giving them instructions, guidance, and opportunities to practice,”

They initiated their study in 1979, and have been assessing the participants based on a wide range of variables (e.g., school performance, IQ, leadership, happiness) across multiple contexts (laboratory and home) since.

Cognitive giftedness matters.

While intellectually gifted children were not different than the comparison group with respect to their temperament, behavioral, social, or emotional functioning, they did differ in regards to their advanced sensory and motor functioning starting at age 1.5, their ability to understand the meaning of words starting at age 1, and their ability to both understand and communicate information thereafter.

Parents of intellectually gifted children reported similar observations and were more likely than those of average children to say that their kids actively elicited stimulation by, for example, requesting intellectual extracurricular activities.

The researchers also measured what they described as academic intrinsic motivation and identified the top 19 percent of the 111 adolescent participants as “motivationally gifted,” displaying extreme enjoyment of school and of learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks and an orientation toward mastery, curiosity, and persistence.

Interestingly, they found very little correspondence between intellectual giftedness and motivational giftedness.

Students with gifted curiosity outperformed their peers on a wide range of educational outcomes, including math and reading, SAT scores, and college attainment. According to ratings from teachers, the motivationally gifted students worked harder and learned more.

suggest that gifted curiosity is a distinct characteristic that contributes uniquely to academic success.

“Motivation should not be considered simply a catalyst for the development of other forms of giftedness, but should be nurtured in its own right,”

All in all, the Fullerton study is proof that giftedness is not something an individual is either born with or without—giftedness is clearly a developmental process.

“giftedness is not a chance event … giftedness will blossom when children’s cognitive ability, motivation and enriched environments coexist and meld together to foster its growth.”