Hi All,

Thanks for all the suggestions. The short of the story is; my boy is eleven years old, very fit, strong and athletic but not a natural fighter - more of a smarts than toughs type (hence a bit late in respect of the current problem to get into self-defence training).

There are 5 other kids of the same age group. Teasing started off verbal, some breaking of rulers and pencils and yesterday that escalated into the alpha bully handing out some punches.

At the verbal stage we initially thought let it go, let them figure it out like most of us have had to do one time or another. But with the physical bullying (at 5 to 1) we decided to contact the school counsellor who explained that verbal teasing was ignored since it usually just went away by itself but physical bullying was never tolerated. There is an established procedure to handle it in a fair and equitable manner for all the kids involved (and I am sure my boy is not totally innocent of any wrong-doing either :).

Anyway, it was all handled Friday afternoon and my boy seems to feel that he and they all got a fair chance to express their side of he story. Hopefully that will be the end of it. Thanks to all of you - we took all of your suggestions into consideration. Many thanks.