Could Babies Serve As a Cure for Bullies?

"Hey, Mr. Bully, take this baby and shove it," might be just the thing to say the next time a mean guy gets in your face.

We're often told the only way to fight a bully is to stick up for yourself, but growing research is finding that babies, not meanness, are the secret weapon to beating the bully cycle.

Babies can beat bullies is the mantra of the Canadian school-based Roots of Empathy anti-bullying program, which introduces schoolchildren to a mother and baby. The kids bond with the baby over a series of visits, which has shown to increase kindness and reduce bullying, The New York Times reports.

The idea that people go gaga for goo-gooing babies isn't anything new. But, instead of falling back on punishment as a deterrent for bullying, school children are being inspired to commit acts of kindness, spurred on by their heart-softening interactions with the little guys, Times reporter David Bornstein writes.

"What I find most fascinating is how the baby actually changes the children's behavior," Bornstein reports. "Teachers have confirmed my impressions: Tough kids smile, disruptive kid's focus, shy kids open up. In a seventh grade class, I found 12-year-olds unabashedly singing nursery rhymes," he writes after experiencing the anti-bullying program first hand.

At a public school in Toronto, Time reports, third- and fourth-graders circle a green blanket and focus intently on a 10-month-old baby with serious brown eyes. Baby Stephana, as they call her, crawls toward the center of the blanket, then turns to glance at her mother, according to the magazine.

"When she looks back to her mom, we know she's checking in to see if everything's cool," one boy, who is learning how to understand and respond to the emotions of the baby in the Roots of Empathy program, tells Time.
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"We love when we get a colicky baby," the program's founder, Mary Gordon, tells Time. "Then the mother will usually tell the class how frustrating and annoying it is when she can't figure out what to do to get the baby to stop crying. That gives children insight into the parent's perspective -- and into how children's behavior can affect adults, often something they have never thought about."

Gordon started Roots of Empathy after working as a teacher in Canadian schools, where she says she encountered neglectful and abusive parents, she tells The Times. She wanted to teach parents and students firsthand the power of empathy.

These days, Roots arranges monthly class visits to kindergarten to seventh grade classrooms in Canada by a mother and her baby (who must be between 2 and 4 months old at the beginning of the school year), The Times reports.

During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it's a father) on a green blanket -- which represents new life and nature -- and they try to understand the baby's feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them.

"It's a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others," Gordon tells The Times. "It carries over to the rest of class."

The baby seems to act like a heart-softening magnet, Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, an applied developmental psychologist and professor at the University of British Columbia, tells The Times.

"Do kids become more empathic and understanding? Do they become less aggressive and kinder to each other? The answer is yes and yes," she tells the newspaper. "The question is why."

Some researchers say it is hormones.

C. Sue Carter, a neurobiologist based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has conducted pioneering research into the effects of oxytocin, a hormone that has been linked with caring and trusting behavior. She suspects biology is playing a role in the program's impact.

"I believe that being around the baby is somehow putting the children in a biologically different place," she tells The Times.