Izzy Kalman

Israel "Izzy" Kalman is a Nationally Certified School Psychologist and psychotherapist with over thirty years work experience and Director of Bullies to Buddies, Inc. He has developed a unique approach for teaching people how to quickly and easily solve their interpersonal problems through the practical application of the Golden Rule. For the past decade he has been working full time giving seminars to mental health professionals and educators throughout the country under the auspices of Cross Country Education. Izzy is author/creator of Bullies2Buddies.com and writes a Psychology Today blog on bullying called, A Psychological Solution to Bullying.

From bullies2buddies.com:

My name is Israel C. "Izzy" Kalman. I have been working as a school psychologist and psychotherapist since 1978. For close to three decades, I've been intensively helping victims of bullying, initially children and after a few years, adults as well, for I realized that the same principles apply to interpersonal problems throughout the lifetime. More recently, I have been teaching these methods to mental health professionals and educators primarily throughout the United States and Canada. The methods I have developed I believe are the quickest, easiest, and most natural that exist, and are consistent with all major schools of psychology, philosophy and religion.

I had been an expert in bullying for over a decade before the Columbine shooting made bullying a household concern but hadn't realized it because I had never thought of the behaviors I was dealing with as "bullying." Bullying had been an obscure field within psychology that few mental health professionals ever studied. When I saw how "bullying" was being defined, I learned that I had been treating victims of "bullying" all those years.

Because of Columbine, the psychological and educational communities went to the academic literature to learn about bullying and found a field that had been created by a Norwegian researcher, Prof. Dan Olweus. All the subsequent work on bullying was based on his definitions, research and recommendations. The United States and most of the modern world began intensively implementing anti-bullying programs based on the teachings of Dan Olweus.

However, when I examined his approach to bullying, I saw that it contradicted almost everything that I had learned in the psychological helping professions. Rather than helping kids learn how to deal with being bullied, this new approach required professionals to act as law enforcement officers protecting kids from each other, taking the side of victims against their bullies, and apprehending, interrogating and punishing bullies. I knew that this approach couldn't possibly work, for when we do this at home with our own kids, it leads to constant fighting, makes them angry at us as well, and prevents them from learning how to deal with each other on their own. How could an approach that leads to intensive sibling rivalry at home possibly create harmony in school?

I therefore decided to create a website that would teach kids, parents and schools how to deal with bullying and aggression by applying established psychological principles. Before long, I left my job as a school psychologist with the New York City Department of Education so that I could devote myself full time to teaching and creating materials for dealing with bullying.