What to actually do when your kid says they’re being bullied: real advice from a parent and classroom aide
Last Tuesday, I was folding my husband’s dirty work socks on the couch when my 13-year-old Jax slammed the front door open and stomped down the stairs, backpack thudding against the drywall. He’d had a bad day on the bus, he said. A group of boys had been calling his thick black frames “bug eyes” all week, and someone had dumped a half-empty bottle of soda on his math notebook that morning. He was red-faced, voice cracking, and waiting for me to do what most parents would do: grab my phone, type out an angry email to the principal, post a furious note in the PTA group chat, fix it for him.
Instead, I gestured to the granola bar I’d left out on the coffee table, leaned back, and said, “That sucks. And for what it’s worth? Most people get picked on like this at some point. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, and it doesn’t mean your whole school year is ruined.”
He blinked at me. “Aren’t you mad?”
“Of course I’m mad someone was a jerk to you,” I said. “But let’s not turn this into a whole crisis before we talk about what actually needs to happen here.”
I’ve worked as a part-time aide in a local middle school for four years, so I see this dynamic play out at least once a week. I’ve sat with a girl who cried for 20 minutes in the nurse’s office because classmates made fun of the gap between her front teeth. I’ve walked a 7th grade boy to the office after he got tripped in the hallway every day for a month for bringing his chess set to lunch. Administrators do the best they can with the rules they have: they call parents, issue detentions, make kids write apology notes. But half the time, the bullying just moves somewhere no one can see: to the group chat after school, to the back of the bus, to the empty corner of the playground during recess. You can’t eliminate every jerk from a kid’s life, no matter how hard you try.
That’s the blunt truth no one likes to say out loud: yes, your kid is probably going to get bullied at some point. It sucks, but panicking and rushing in to fix every tiny slight doesn’t do them any favors. The “zero tolerance” myth that we can keep all bad things from happening to our kids just sets everyone up for failure when the inevitable happens.
When Jax finished venting, I asked him the two questions I ask every kid I work with, and every kid that comes to me with this: First, is anyone hitting you, or threatening to hurt you physically? Second, is this happening every single day in a space where you can’t get away from it? If the answer to either is yes, I’m on the phone with the principal before the kid even finishes talking. But for Jax, the answer was no. It was annoying, it hurt his feelings, but it wasn’t dangerous, and he could change the situation himself if he wanted to.
I asked him next: “Do you actually even like sitting up front with those boys?” He shrugged, admitted he’d been trying to sit with them because he thought it would make him cool, but they mostly just talked about TikTok dances he didn’t care about and made fun of everyone else on the bus anyway. “Isn’t Milo sitting in the back row?” I said. “He brings those sour candy sticks you like, right? And you two played Minecraft together last weekend.” Jax stared at me for a second, like he’d forgotten that was an option. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I guess I could sit back there.”
That was it. No angry emails, no parent meetings, no detentions. He switched seats the next day, and hasn’t had a problem on the bus since. Sometimes the boys still yell a dumb comment when he walks by, but he just flips them off and keeps going. It’s not a perfect, fairy-tale ending. It’s just a kid learning how to handle a bad situation without his mom jumping in to fix it.
Most of the time, that’s all that’s needed. I’ve seen so many parents turn a minor mean comment into a weeks-long drama that makes the whole thing hurt way more than it needed to. When the mom of that girl who got left out of the birthday party demanded we get all the girls’ accounts suspended and force them to invite her daughter, the girl herself just wanted to block the group and get ice cream with her other friend. We let her do that, and a week later she couldn’t even remember the birthday girl’s name. If we’d made a big deal out of it, it would have been all she thought about for months.
The practical stuff I tell other parents is simple, and it doesn’t require a lot of work: First, don’t panic before your kid panics. Your stress tells them this is a disaster they can’t handle on their own, even when it’s just a minor annoyance. Second, ask those two specific questions first to figure out if you actually need to step in. Third, if you don’t need to step in, help your kid find one small thing they can change themselves, not one big thing you change for them. It could be switching seats, blocking phone numbers, sitting with a different group at lunch. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. Fourth, stop repeating the lie that “being nice will make them be nice back” or the vague “it gets better” line. Just say “this sucks right now, what can we do to make it suck less today?”
Last week Jax came home and mentioned someone made a joke about his glasses at lunch. I didn’t jump up and ask for names. I just nodded and said “that sucks” while I dished up spaghetti. He laughed and said he told the kid “at least my glasses don’t make me look like a confused potato” and then went off to do his homework. It’s not fixed forever. There will be bad days, there will be times I have to step in. But that’s the point. Kids don’t need us to fix every bad thing that happens to them. They need us to help them learn how to handle it themselves, because one day we won’t be there to do it for them.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What to actually do when your kid says they’re being bullied: real advice from a parent and classroom aide