Study finds bullies have more children than non-bullies

Perhaps it would be more useful to say (specifically for that first more valid study) that bullies have kids earlier.

Yeah it feels like too much "research" is just click bait at this point (or just a lazy dissertation).

Yeah, checking at such a young age is a serious distortion of the data. The average age at first pregnancy is somewhere around 30. That means they are counting exclusively pregnancies that are untypically early. A more accurate summary of the results would be:

Bullies have more accidental children before reaching the age where the average couple will start to deliberately get pregnant.

What exactly is fertility here? I don’t think all the non-bullies are shooting blanks. What if the bullies are just worse on average at family planning? How are you differentiating civilizations, especially in the modern age when national borders don’t constrain enormous trade of goods and culture?

>Presumable individual aggression versus fertility is an inverted U shaped curve in which fertility rises with aggression to an inflection point and then declines

Are you sure about the decline part?

My experience as a father of a son that’s 6 and observer of his friends. I’ve been coaching a group of his buddies since they were 3 and can see a lot of patterns. About 50% is seemingly innate and potentially communication related. A lot of them grow out of it as they learn to communicate better. About 10-20% are non aggressors and never behave this way even when communication was a barrier. They follow instructions and typically have a good moral compass and excel at communication until around 5-6 (others catch up). They share well, play nicely, etc. The others are somewhere inbetween. They likely are somewhat aggressive at times but it’s generally a learned from older siblings behavior or they’re going along with someone else’s behaviors. Then, there are a few little shits who act like they get beat in the home (and probably do, honestly) and these ones are the worst - they see red and will kill/maim your non aggressors without a thought. The non aggressors don’t really understand violence and it confuses them why a “friend” would hit/push/snatch/not share. It’s kid of sad.

My kid is one of the non aggressors and I teach him self defense. I’m slowly revealing my true feelings to him as he’s maturing enough to handle it responsibly but I’d much rather him get expelled for zero tolerance self defensive fighting than be a victim of bullying.

Kids change obviously so we’ll see how they continue to develop and mature out of or into bully behavior, a few of the worsts have already chilled out a lot over the past few years while a few have become worse than they were when I met them. The thing that's weird is when they start distinguishing on things that are completely learned from adults; "poor" vs "rich", cars, vacations, etc are notable but also the stereotypical "cool" vs "nerd" interests and how they organize accordingly into their cliques.

So if we have to go with your observation, the bully is the leader of a group. Such a person is rarely alone in life, and it would follow with the article. To live with yourself as a bully, you need a complicit group. If the group becomes aware of you, you kind of need a new group to believe you.

A group can be just two people. The bully exists because there is another that allows the group to exist (allows the abusive dynamic to exist). If the group stops existing, the bully stops existing, unless they find another group that allows it.

The bully by themselves (to be truly alone) would feel uncomfortable because their life is centered around extreme group dynamics.

Most importantly the school is in the circle of support of the bully because they won't let the victim leave and won't allow the victim to defend themselves.

I on the other hand, found no such correlation. The primary bully did not do it to get approval of the crowds but because he was a psychopath.

I agree, somewhat.

In my high school, there was hierarchy of bullies. Some bullied other bullies. The victim bullies bullied other weaker kids. And some bullies only bullied other bullies, they were considered heros.

I have known at least 7 people in my short life whose MAJOR defining personality attribute was bullying. Two of them were old enough to have had kids at the time, and both had 5 or more. One has a PhD and that was and still is way outside of the norm. Just anecdotal, but it is a data point.

It's a spectrum rather than binary categorization.

It's pretty easy to see that certain people are bully-like and certain people are definitely not bully-like.

Do you reject the premise that people can be tagged or filtered by any aspects, whatsoever? Bullying behavior, perhaps, needn't be a "core" or "genetic" attribute of a person in order to meaningfully discern whether or not one's engaged in it at significantly higher rates.

What's the distribution, I wonder. Bimodal?

[dead]

That's not the paper, that's just the abstract, which doesn't actually talk about sample size. It does point out an important limitation of the research: it looks at number of children specifically at 23 and 24 years old, rather than the full range of ages at which people have children in Canada. Which is the other limitation: it only looked at Canada, and the abstract doesn't say which parts of Canada, so there's so much information missing that it's impossible to tell what this study actually found.

I was thinking of that scene/meme from Back to the Future, "Hey, wait, I've seen this one!"

We live in an inexplicable mixture of idiocracy + matrix + terminator. Only aliens are missing. Yet.

Eugenics watered down just enough to be palatable to the average American?

Standing up for someone else, you can be 10x over the top karen, and you are an alley and a hero.

Do it for yourself and you are an asshole. Other people's causes give you cover to act poorly.

*pre-edit, I realize this gives us a way to demonize those protecting the weak via an Ad hominem against the moral.

>crotchspawn

New word for me. Good one.

Counterpoint: I was bullied, have two kids and want more.

I was fed a diet of "just ignore them and they'll go away" (ha), the school promising to do something about it but never more than a slap on the wrist for the bullies, "violence never solves anything", I learned to stay within view of the teachers at recess.

As I got older, I realized the issue was the authority figures in my life never allowed or taught me how to fight, physically or otherwise. The practical solutions to the problem made them so uncomfortable that they avoided even discussing them. So they just let me suffer for years knowing that eventually I'd graduate and the problem would "go away".

Let's just say that my kids won't have that same upbringing, and any bully who tries what I experienced will be in for a shock.

I personally wasn't bullied, but if I had to live in the school district I grew up in and felt I had no way out, I would have never had kids. It was that bad.

Luckily that wasn't the case, so I do, and a change of scenery helps a ton. The way they describe school now is nothing like when I was in public school.

I was bullied and have 3 kids. Living well is the best revenge.

Oh I just got it, that was funny