School is finally in. And unfortunately, so is bullying.

Bullies go shopping in September, and it’s not just for school clothes or supplies. They shop for targets.

By the end of October, most bullies will have found their prey. These bullies aren’t looking for someone to fight. They profile kids they can overwhelm, who wither when criticized and mocked. Here’s how you can help defend your child against this intentional and repeated form of abuse from those with superior physical, verbal or social power.

The main quality most bullies look for is non-assertive and weak body language, which can include fearful or anxious facial expressions, rocking side-to-side when standing, slumped shoulders, little if any eye contact, short strides, and kids who don’t smile.

The main quality most bullies look for is non-assertive and weak body language, which can include fearful or anxious facial expressions, rocking side-to-side when standing, slumped shoulders, little if any eye contact, short strides, and kids who don’t smile.

1. Help them “fake it till they make it.” Coach your child to appear more confident and relaxed on the outside, even when they don’t feel that way on the inside. Remind them to stand taller, breathe deeply, hold their chin level, make more eye contact, lengthen their stride, and put a slight smile on their face.

A slight smile not only gives your child an air of confidence, it may also beneficially alter your child’s body chemistry as well. Harvard University’s Amy Cuddy has explored this dynamic through what she calls “power posing.” Students were told to stand in front of a mirror and strike an assertive pose, such as the famous Wonder Woman pose: hands on hips, legs slightly apart, shoulders back, and with a confident and slight smile on their face. The chemicals in their body associated with self-confidence increased after just a few minutes.

2. Forge friendships. Maintaining and growing friendships are essential for children, since bullies seek isolated prey. Help your child forge at least one meaningful friendship, but ideally three to five. Many targets are shy, and shy kids often need help with friendships. Remind your child to ask other children questions about their lives, to share their toys, and remember other kids’ birthdays. Have your child’s classmates into your home, and try not to contaminate their play by intervening too much. For some kids, especially boys, helping them forge more friendships will mean less video game time, so be prepared for this battle ahead of time.

3. Avoid the edges. Bullies want a public display of pain or anguish from targets, but they don’t want to get caught by authority. So they roam the edges of rooms and groups. Encourage your child to stay toward the front and middle of groups. Encourage them to ride toward the front of the school bus, where it’s easier for the driver to see them.

4. Memorize verbal comebacks. The vast majority of bullying is verbal, not physical. When your child cowers and says nothing in response, this can encourage bullies to keep going, and even escalate their attack. Help your child to practice resistance without war. This resistance can be offered through just one word: “Whatever.” It’s a great comeback because it’s dismissive, but it’s not a fighting word, which could get your child sent to the principal’s office.

Such a comeback involves more than just what your child says. It’s also how your child says it. Coach him or her to speak with confidence and then walk away. Too many targets try to reason with their bully through long, drawn out conversations. This is almost always a waste of time.

5. Be good at something. Kids who get bullied are often on the bottom rung of the social ladder, where kids are known as “nobodies.” Assess your child’s interests, then help your child explore those interests. Since many targets are shy, you will probably have to push them in this direction, but without shoving them. For example, being good at an instrument can help your child be a “somebody,” especially if they choose a popular one, such as the guitar.

With all that said, no child is bully-proof, and most targets don’t talk.

This week, promise your child that you will not run to the school and make things worse if he tells you about bullying, which is one of a target’s greatest fears.

Tell your child that you will come up with a game plan together, one that includes documentation.

Above all, tell your child that what is happening is wrong, that there is nothing wrong with him or her, and you will always be by their side.

Paul Coughlin is an expert witness regarding bullying and the law, a former newspaper editor and is the author of numerous books, including Raising Bully-Proof Kids. He is the Founder of The Protectors: Freedom From Bullying-Courage, Character & Leadership for Life, which provides a comprehensive and community-wide solution to adolescent bullying in schools, summer camps, faith-based organizations, and other places where bullying can be prevalent.

Sayreville Schools Superintendent Rich Labbe made the announcement last week during a meeting with football parents, after a criminal investigation found credible evidence of pervasive and generally accepted forms of harassment, intimidation and bullying on the team. Now, the Associated Press reports, seven teens are facing sex crime charges.

The was the right decision by the school district because contrary to popular myth, bullying players and coaches don’t listen much to peace, love and understanding. They listen to swift, immediate and painful consequences, which is exactly what school officials did.

It’s the right medicine for an illness that plaques this nation.

Still, some New Jersey parents are furious, saying the school’s decision is unfair to innocent players who didn’t bully. Not so fast parents. Most bullying takes place in front of peers but away from authority. Bullies bank on a code of silence from bystanders who should speak up but don’t. So when it comes to bullying, there aren’t many “innocent bystanders.”

Last September, in Utah, stand-up coach Matt Labrum and his staff suspended all 80 players on the Union High School football team for their off-field antics, as well.

Labrum believes football helps create great men. As the founder of an anti-bullying organization, The Protectors, I wish I could agree.

Of all the complaints we receive about sports programs and bullying, no other sport comes even close to the horrendous and sometimes criminal behavior associated not just with football players, but with coaches as well.

A mother from Ellwood City, Pa., reported how several high school football players forced her 13-year-old son to drink urine out of a plastic soda bottle.

Roxana Spady of Columbus, Neb., sued Columbus Public Schools. She says her son was physically assaulted and held while a team member defecated in a dormitory toilet and then dunked her son’s head in it.

Even flag football is messed up. Four Walker Middle School players in Tampa, Fla., faced criminal charges, including third-degree felony battery. Two received 5 years probation for sodomizing the younger player with hockey and broom sticks.

A California pastor remembers how high school players pulled his pants and underwear down to his ankles and shoved Icy Hot up his rectum with their fingers and a wooden tongue depressor. He says they did it multiple times and threatened to beat and murder him if he told anyone.

Football culture harbors bullying, a fact illuminated by the damning Wells Report commissioned by the NFL, which led to the firing of bully player Richie Incognito, coach Jim Turner, and head trainer Kevin O’Neill.

Here’s why football is more messed up than other high school sports: Bullying follows power, and football programs are the most powerful entity on most school campuses.

This power delivers privilege, entitlement and above-the-law thinking. It’s Enron with swollen biceps and acne. Also, bullying thrives in larger groups, and football has a larger roster than other sports.

This attitude that harms football culture has a poster boy, former Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito, who in the Wells Report exhibits classic bullying mentality: hubris, lack of remorse,obstruction of justice, blaming the victim and unwillingness to acknowledge wrongdoing.

The disgraced player with one of the dirtiest records in the NFL surely learned how to get away with bullying well before college and going pro.

I help numerous schools fight bullying each year. “If you really want to decrease bullying,” I tell them, “start with your football coaches,” who sometimes are also the school’s athletic directors, giving them even more power and cover for their transgressions.

If these coaches possess the right moral fiber and have had anti-bullying training, then schools have real advocates. If not, one or more could be harming that school right now.

Ironically, football also has the power to lead our schools away from bullying, which is the No. 1 form of child abuse in the nation. Better football players, urged by better coaches, are taking the cachet of athleticism seriously and using their prominence to influence others.

Take quarterback Carson Jones from Queen Creek, Arizona, for example. He befriended fellow student Chy Johnson, who was born with a birth defect, had trash thrown at her, was called “stupid” and was pushed down in her school’s hallways. Carson “saved me,” Johnson told a reporter.

Like the football player I spoke with in Plano, Texas, who saw his teammates regularly tormenting a kid. He calmly sat next to the kid, and the bullying stopped.

These are the players with the right stuff that coach Labrum believes makes real men. I agree with him there.

The NFL is gaining hard-fought yardage against its bullying culture. But why is high school football so blindsided? There are dozens, if not hundreds, of broken programs just like the one in New Jersey. They, too, should be shut down and rebuilt by real coaches with the red-blooded values of respect, freedom and dignity for all.

Paul Coughlin is an expert witness regarding bullying and the law, a former newspaper editor and is the author of numerous books, including Raising Bully-Proof Kids. He is the Founder of The Protectors: Freedom From Bullying-Courage, Character & Leadership for Life, which provides a comprehensive and community-wide solution to adolescent bullying in schools, summer camps, faith-based organizations, and other places where bullying can be prevalent.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. –  A South Dakota mother is the target of both praise and criticism after she blogged that kids being bullied should toughen up.

Stephanie Metz’s  wide-ranging post, which spread on Facebook after she shared a link, was as much about oversensitive modern parents as it was about kids.

“The main message is `don’t be afraid to parent your kids.’ They need to deal with some hardships,” the 29-year-old mother of two from Rapid City said Wednesday by phone.

“It’s not our job to be our children’s friend and make life easy for them,” she added.

The Oct. 25 post on “The Metz Family” blog was titled “Why My Kids Are NOT the Center of My World.” Its original audience was eight friends and family members who have followed the blog since her first son was born four years ago and who live out of state.

Metz said she posted a link to the blog on Facebook, her friend shared it and then her friend shared it “and it just kind of went crazy from there.” The blog had been clicked on 885,000 times as of Wednesday and received countless other clicks on online sites that have posted it, she said.

She accepts the criticism and acknowledges her sons are still young — ages 4 and 2.

Metz said she doesn’t condone violence but also doesn’t think parents should let their kids shut down when someone’s mean to them. It’s a philosophy she said she and her husband, Matt Metz, learned from their parents and are using on their own boys.

“I feel like we’re creating a generation of victims,” she said.

Bullying expert Paul Coughlin said there’s some merit to that because some parents are too quick to solve their children’s problems. He’s president and founder of The Protectors, a Medford, Ore.-based organization that works with public and private schools to reduce bullying.

“I’ve coached those kids who are over-parented and you kind of want to give them a T-shirt that says `does not play well with others,”‘ said Coughlin, who’s also a soccer coach. “It does make for some fragile children when we over-parent.”

Coughlin said everyday conflict does not constitute bullying. And studies have found that most children will experience some bullying growing up, but it doesn’t do serious harm, he said. But by trying to protect their children, some parents increase their children’s chances of repeatedly being bullied.

“This over-parenting also is almost a perfect storm for creating serial targets,” he said. “Over-parented children are more likely to be serial targets than non-over-parented children.”

History reminds us that through the portal of individual injustice and abuse strangely flows the opportunity to let freedom ring. The NFL, with its reputation for no-nonsense reform on the battlefield, finds itself on the eve of such a hallowed moment taking place on America’s much larger battlefield for the health and well-being of our children: The fight against systematic abuse we euphemistically call bullying.

Enter the NFL’s reluctant, if not accidental, Rosa Parks: Dolphin’s offensive tackle Jonathan Martin.

Weary Rosa Parks, that icon of the Civil Rights Movement who refused to relinquish her seat on that segregated bus so many years ago, became a then-reluctant reformer against systematic abuse and humiliation.

Unlike Parks though, Martin, a Stanford graduate, left his seat and the Dolphins, reportedly after two years of abuse and assault, culminating in a move straight out of the bully playbook: When the target [Martin] sits down to eat at the team’s lunch table, the rest of us will get up in a public display of contempt intended to isolate and humiliate him. Reports say Martin stormed out and didn’t return.

His alleged ringleader bully could not have a more perfect name, since bullies are adept at walking socially inappropriate and criminal lines: Richie Incognito.

Respected coach Tony Dungy reportedly put him on his “DNDC” list: “Do Not Hire Because of Character.” Incognito, a 9-year-pro, was considered one of the NFL’s dirtiest players when he was with the St. Louis Rams. He may well be the NFL’s Bull Connor, too.

Reports say Incognito is considered a “leader,” within the team [Bull Connor was a leader, a Commissioner of Public Safety]. This also fits the bully profile since many are leaders – in the wrong direction.

Incognito reportedly sent texts and left voicemail messages for his biracial teammate that were racially charged [“half-n*****], threatened to defecate in Martin’s mouth, and track down his family and harm them.

This isn’t good-natured teasing where both people are laughing and where people come together in a spirit of fraternity. It is taunting, harassment and illegal, if proven.

By leaving the organization, Martin, a two-year starting player, forced it to contend with an age-old problem within sports, especially football, a program that we get more complaints about than all other high school sports programs combined.

Like Parks, Martin may well be a reluctant reformer who has shown America’s youth that to be a target doesn’t make you “weak” [starting tackle] or “stupid” [Stanford graduate]. By leaving a bullying hot spot, he shows us that such behavior makes us wise, brave and dignified.

Will the NFL show us similar virtue and lead us against what many believe is the leading form of child abuse in the nation, the only kind the most beleaguered among us are told to “just ignore”?

Because in the end, sports aren’t about sports. They are a fusing of our hopes and aspirations, our dreams and apprehensions. In their most noble expression, sports are the inner us, our collective need as incurably social beings to cheer for a common hero, an extension of our own heroic capacity, latent as it may be. We need help getting it out. Sports helps this happen.

Ironic, isn’t it, how the sport most hampered by accusations of abuse and psychological assault is also strangely the sport that can lead us as a nation to a freer, bullying-less future?

We know this to be true given its cultural horsepower. We feel it is so when we witness such adulation and athletic prowess. But will this governing body have the courage and guts to make it so through bold freedom-from-bullying initiatives that break past prejudice, ignorance, contempt and other building blocks of systematic abuse and injustice that bullying requires to exist and thrive?

That’s the real story here, and it’s the real victory an entire nation longs to celebrate and cheer.

Paul Coughlin is an expert witness regarding bullying and the law, a former newspaper editor and is the author of numerous books, including Raising Bully-Proof Kids. He is the Founder of The Protectors: Freedom From Bullying-Courage, Character & Leadership for Life, which provides a comprehensive and community-wide solution to adolescent bullying in schools, summer camps, faith-based organizations, and other places where bullying can be prevalent.

Buchanan admits that the win “wasn’t good for anybody…The score could have very easily been 150 to nothing.”

I have been in Buchanan’s sweaty sneakers.

Also a high school coach, I’ve won games by more than 15 points–in soccer. He’s right. It’s no good for anyone.

Like Buchanan, I could have made the score far worse. I, too, have pulled my starters early in the game like I did this Tuesday and we still scored 9 goals.

I’ve even played with 4 less players, quietly pulling them off the pitch so not to embarrass the other team any more. And we still kept scoring.

I know this drill. And I also know what bullying is and isn’t.

By framing what happened as bullying, we learn two important lessons on the chalk board of life: Most don’t know its definition, and it’s well past time we find another word to describe this intentional form of abuse and assault.

Though definitions can vary, most agree that adolescent bullying is the deployment of superior power (can be physical, verbal, social and even economic) to intentionally harm (not just hurt) an individual (not team) over a period of time and for no good reason.

It’s victimization without provocation, and it usually includes humiliation, threat of further abuse, isolation and some form of terror through power is wedded to fear.

These terms must be applied interpersonally (think person(s) on person), not corporately (think team). Targets are abused and assaulted on a personal level. Their very identity is impugned and often damaged.

Bullies want targets to question their value as human beings, which didn’t happen here. Reports show that the winning team didn’t talk smack.

They didn’t demean the other team as individuals. Rather, they put on a clinic with superior skill and athleticism.

Other teams should be learning from this coach instead of accusing him of some of the worst behavior imaginable.

The losing team (and parents) may have felt humiliation (it would have been worse if Buchanan told his team not to score), but it’s not the kind of intentional humiliation that damages on a soul level.

Also, the winning team didn’t intend to socially marginalize the other team, another hallmark of bullying. The winning team didn’t wed power to psychological fear, anxiety and terror, the way bullies do.

Knee-jerk reactions like this reveal that to most, bullying really means any event that makes me feel bummed-out sometimes, a kind of emotional owie in a culture gifted in creating an ever-growing list of victimhood.

It’s more than time to forbid this word from appearing on the sports page. It’s time to get rid of it completely.

With what?

Bullying is a specific form of abuse that is fueled primarily by hate and contempt. It’s assault upon a person’s psyche, a diminishment of their core identity to the point where a person may even want to die.

Assault is a better term. Perhaps even good old-fashioned “Hating” or a new word, “Contempting.”

The mood in Buchanan’s post-game locker room was funeral-like. In doing what they were trained to do through superior personnel, coaching or both, it was apparent that this team didn’t feel good about what they had accomplished.

My, I’ve been there as well. But it wasn’t because they assaulted the other team, expressing contempt and disdain.

Contrast this to how bullies feel after they attack. They do not feel a mingling of remorse and regret. Studies show that they feel electrified, glee and even pride for their “accomplishment.” They take pleasure in another’s pain.

I just gave you a simplified definition of sadism.

Paul Coughlin is an expert witness regarding bullying and the law, a former newspaper editor and is the author of numerous books, including Raising Bully-Proof Kids. He is the Founder of The Protectors: Freedom From Bullying-Courage, Character & Leadership for Life, which provides a comprehensive and community-wide solution to adolescent bullying in schools, summer camps, faith-based organizations, and other places where bullying can be prevalent.