Being bullied due to a sickness

Mickey Guisewite, Parent With A Purpose, shares advice for parents on how to best help their children deal with bullying after recovery from a serious illness
Pediatric Cancer Advice | Handling Bullying After To A Sickness
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Being bullied due to a sickness

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Unfortunately, when our son went back to school, there was an incident where a student bullied him. And it's unbelievable to think about that that could happen, but it did. Our son wanted so much to just go back to school and be normal. He still had a central line in his chest under his t-shirt that had to stay there for a while. His hair was still growing back. But he really just wanted to be normal. And unfortunately, he was walking down the hall one day and an older boy yelled out, "Hey cancer boy," and our son was devastated. He wound up coming home from school. The school did an amazing job of handling it. The head of the school brought the student in, brought their family in, brought our family in, and we all sat down. The boy, I think, in the end was very ignorant. I don't think he quite understood how sick our son had been and how tough it was for him. He obviously needed some serious sensitivity training and he got that training. I mean, he had to then do community service with cancer patients and learn what that was like. He needed to write a letter of apology to our son and apologize to him in person. At the end of it, quite honestly, it had never occurred to me that somebody would bully my son after he had just gotten through cancer treatment, so I had never really prepared him for that happening. What I did after it had happened though was I just took my son aside and said, "You know what? You have gotten through so much. The person who did this is the one who has a problem. Just let it go and move on." And he did.

Mickey Guisewite, Parent With A Purpose, shares advice for parents on how to best help their children deal with bullying after recovery from a serious illness

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Mickey Guisewite

Parent with a Purpose

Mickey Guisewite is a former advertising executive and syndicated newspaper columnist who started The Bottomless Toy Chest after her son successfully completed cancer treatment. The Bottomless Toy Chest is a nonprofit organization devoted to delivering toys, crafts and hands-on activities to hospitalized pediatric cancer patients. Mickey lives at home with her husband, son, daughter, two dogs, two cats and two turtles. When she’s not delivering toys to sick kids, she’s at home trying to find a tiny space on the couch among her two-legged and four-legged family members. 

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