Adaptive and Nonadaptive Help Seeking With Peer Harassment: An Integrative Perspective of Coping and Self-Regulation

Abstract

When harassed by peers, elementary school students often face a dilemma of whether to ask their teacher for help. Assistance may be useful, and perhaps necessary. However, there can be social costs; children generally are expected to resolve interpersonal conflicts on their own. Two theoretical perspectives (i.e., coping and self-regulation) provide a framework for conceptualizing adaptive help seeking as a strategy for dealing with peer harassment. A key feature of the strategy is the student's recognition that help is necessary to maintain safety. This article reviews research that supports this conceptualization. Studies focusing on students' perceptions of harassment and judgments about the necessity for help are integrated with developmental research on peer conflict and aggression. Adaptive help seeking is contrasted with two nonadaptive responses to harassment (i.e., seeking help when it is unnecessary and failure to seek help when it is necessary), developmental implications are discussed, and directions for research are suggested.

Notes

¹In addition to necessity, a self-regulative perspective, discussed subsequently, points to several other situational demands to which a request for help can potentially be calibrated.

²As an example of a strategy that might fail in the long term but succeed in the short, one can envision that staying home from school reduces a child's immediate stress caused by bullying but does not promote the development of social competence and interpersonal skills needed for future conflict resolution.