Bravo for you and your son. I’m fifty-five. My Dad taught me and my four brothers to box and to stand up for ourselves. I studied Goshin Do karate years ago. I’ll never forget when my oldest brother was picked on by three kids in the schoolyard. He bit one of them. The kids father was a doctor. This doctor called my dad up complaining about how awful it was what brother had done and how the bite could have become infected. My dad calmly offered the good doctor a chance to get together and discuss the matter ‘’like men’’. The doctor declined and the word went out to not pick on my brother. I remember some wisdom one of my old Catholic school nuns once imparted to me, certainly applies to bullies, Sister Mary Immaculata said, “Young man, never discount the spiritually transforming experience of pain’’.(You’d have to understand yours truly wasn’t always the ,uh, most attentive of students in class, hence sisters words.)
Getting into fights was a normal part of growing up. I’m 51 and I had my fair share of scrapes as a kid, but you just kept going on. No one coddled you if you got hit or beat up.
I was tiny. I got picked on by the biggest bully at the school. This kid was just plain mean.
I had caught him stealing mail out of mailboxes, and someone reported him to the principal. That somebody wasn’t me, but he knew that I knew he was stealing mail. So he got his friends together to watch him jump me. They were all watching the fight.
I remember one of their words, many years later.
“He grabbed you, picked you up to spin you around.”
“Then later he was bent over on the ground and you walked away without a scratch”.
After that nobody messed with me.