For the grown-ups who want to help

About ICAN Practical Psychology
& Prof. CK Wong, JP

A note from Prof. Wong · the method · the author · full credentials

• The Note
• ICAN Practical Psychology
• The Author
• Prof. CK Wong, JP

A Note from Prof. CK Wong, JP

Let me begin with the size of this thing, because most of us underestimate it. Worldwide, close to one in three young teenagers has been bullied recently — around 32 per cent of boys and 28 per cent of girls. It peaks earlier than parents expect: in the United States, 26.3 per cent of middle-schoolers report being bullied, against 15.7 per cent in high school. Across the OECD the average is about 19 per cent, and in this part of the world it runs higher still — Singapore 25 per cent, mainland China 23 per cent, and Hong Kong, at 32 per cent, the highest of the 54 education systems compared. Then there is the part with no school gate to leave behind: close to half of teenagers report being harassed online.

Why not? Our own research with young readers found the same three fears braided together, again and again. “If I tell, I’m a snitch — and it will only get worse.” “No one will believe me, and even if they do, nothing will happen.” And underneath both, the quietest and most damaging: “Maybe it’s me. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.” A child in that bind is not being difficult or secretive. They have done the arithmetic and concluded that silence is the safest option available to them. What they long for is very simple — to be believed the first time, and for it to stop without them becoming a bigger target.

So if you are the parent who found out late, or the teacher who sensed something and did not see it happen — please put down the guilt. You were not failing to notice. You were on the wrong side of a wall the child built for reasons that made sense to them. And you are not powerless: there is a way through, and it is learnable.

The method: three dimensions, three levels

The method inside these books did not begin as a story. It began in my clinic and in schools, as a way of understanding bullying that turns on its three dimensions. Bullying is never simply one “bad” child. It is a symptom — a sign of difficulty — and it lives in three places at once: in the child who is bullied, in the child who bullies (very often a child carrying an untreated hurt of their own), and in the interaction between them, the pattern that keeps repeating. Work on only one of the three and it regrows. It has to be met on all three together, and at three levels: the individual, the family, and the school.

For the grown-up reading this, start at the individual level — the part you can influence today.

The first principle is to separate the “person” from the “matter”: care for the child — every child, including the one who did the hurting — while never tolerating the harm. Warmth for the person; firmness with the act.

Then the response depends on what kind of bullying it is. Where there is physical harm, threats, or anything unlawful, the rule is simple and non-negotiable — zero tolerance. It is handled at once and lawfully: the child tells a trusted adult straight away, and the adults bring in the school and, where needed, the police. This is never a child’s to manage alone, and never a place for “just ignore it.”

Where the bullying is verbal, social or psychological, the work is quieter but just as real. Help the child steady their inner state, so their feelings are not pulled about by the person attacking them. Help them hold on to their own worth, so an insult is never accepted as a verdict. And help them answer with calm and restraint rather than feeding the exchange — because so much of this behaviour is fishing for a reaction, and when the reaction stops, it often starves. Your part is not to hand the child a script. It is to be the steady presence that makes all of this possible, and the person they can always come to — which, given what the numbers say about telling, may be the most valuable thing you ever do for them.

And if at any point it is beyond what you can handle — the fear won’t lift, your child seems to be sinking, or you simply don’t know — that is not failure. That is the moment to bring in help: a school counsellor, a doctor, a mental-health professional; and for anything physical or criminal, the authorities. Knowing when to reach for help is itself one of the strongest moves there is.

One more thing, quietly. The same three dimensions describe what happens to grown-ups — the colleague ground down at work, the harassment that hides inside a family, the abuse that is verbal one day and physical the next. The principles do not change: protect your own worth, steady your inner state, refuse to carry unlawful harm alone, and get help. You cannot pour into a child from an empty cup. Looking after your own mind is not indulgence; it is part of the method.

Which is why this is not a parenting manual, and never pretends to be. It is a story — an adventure, told from a child’s point of view, that never lectures. Across tens of ICAN books and hundreds of thousands of words, my colleagues and I have spent decades turning this psychology into something a young reader can genuinely use; here we have digested it into a tale, so a child learns the way children actually learn — from characters they come to love, who try and fumble and act scared before they act well — never from a box announcing “the lesson is…”. Read it with your child if they will let you; both the reading and the letting are victories. And if you want the fuller, grown-up version of these tools — for your parenting, your classroom, your own life — that is what the other parenting and teaching series in the ICAN family are for. This book is the child’s door in. Those are yours.

— Prof. CK Wong, JP

Creator of ICAN Practical Psychology

Sources of figures: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, global adolescent bullying data (GSHS/HBSC). U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, School Crime Supplement 2021–22, via StopBullying.gov. OECD PISA international comparison (Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China, OECD average). Pew Research Center, Teens and Cyberbullying, 2022. Reader pain-point findings from the publisher’s own 2026 research programme. Verified July 2026.

About ICAN Practical Psychology

Prof. CK Wong, JP created ICAN Practical Psychology more than thirty years ago, while he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He drew it from the essence of various clinical and academic fields — psychiatry, neuroscience, psychotherapy, motivational psychology, and developmental psychology — to build a method that is science-based and values-based. In the decades since, ICAN has reached more than 400 medical, educational and commercial organisations, together with universities, schools and kindergartens, and more than 450,000 people have benefited from it.

ICAN Practical Psychology’s central idea is that our mind is our most important tool. Understood and handled, the mind can be turned, deliberately, back toward the light — so we are not at the mercy of our worst day. From that foundation grow three aims:

The slogan of the whole ICAN library says it in three words: Yes, I CAN.

Learn more at www.micancapital.au (English) · www.micancapital.cn (Simplified Chinese) · www.micancapital.com (Traditional Chinese).

About the Author

Timothy Helliwell is the pen name of a young writer who has been building worlds on paper for as long as he can remember. When Prof. CK Wong, JP introduced his family to ICAN Practical Psychology — as well as the conceptual framework and practical model for understanding how bullying works, why it hurts, and what children can actually do about it — he saw something no textbook or teacher could show him: that the hardest things kids face could live inside a story, carried by monsters and quests instead of lessons. The Monster Keepers grew from that idea. Every book in the series is grounded in real psychology and practical tools from Prof. CK Wong, JP, but you will never catch it teaching.

About Prof. CK Wong, JP

The boy who was held back

Prof. CK Wong, JP, did not begin as anyone’s idea of a future doctor. He had dyslexia at a time when no one had a name for it. His marks were among the worst in his year, he was bullied in primary school, and was told to repeat the year at the end of the first year of his secondary school. For most of his childhood he believed, in his own words, that his life could only ever be a failure.

One quiet night in 1965, nothing around him changed — the same poor report card, the same held-back year — but something in how he saw it did. He decided he would not stay down. That single turn of mind, not of circumstance, set his whole life on a new course, and became, decades later, the seed of ICAN Practical Psychology. The boy who was held back went on to earn his medical degree, to specialise in psychiatry, and to spend more than forty years caring for the minds of others.

He is also a father of three and a grandfather of four, and he will tell you that raising a family taught him as much about the mind as any clinic did. Everything in these books he learned first as a struggling child, then as a medical doctor, and always as a parent and a grandparent. He read every page of this story.