What To Do When Your Kid Asks If They Will Get Bullied At School
Last August, two nights before 7th grade started, I was folding Lila’s new oversized tie-dye hoodie on her bedroom floor while she sorted her new binder stickers. The room smelled like her lavender body spray and the half-eaten bag of Cheetos tucked under her bed. She was quiet for five minutes, then she said, without looking up, “Mom. Am I going to get bullied this year?”
I almost said the automatic thing: “Of course not, honey. Everyone’s going to love you.” I had that line queued up, same as every other parent would. But then I thought about when I was 12, same age, same question. I asked my mom that after I started at a new middle school with my thick coke-bottle glasses and persistent lisp. She told me the same automatic line: don’t be silly, no one’s going to bully you. And when three boys started tripping me in the hallway and calling me four-eyes every day, I didn’t tell anyone for six months. I thought I’d done something wrong. If it wasn’t supposed to happen, it was my fault it was happening to me.
So I closed the hoodie drawer and sat down on the floor next to her. I said, “Honestly? Yeah. Probably. At some point, someone’s going to be mean to you on purpose, over and over.” She blinked, her hand still wrapped around a “Keep Calm and Collect Stickers” sticker, and said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah. You already know you don’t fit the usual, right? You’re tiny for your age, you don’t care about TikTok, you carry that beat-up sticker album everywhere you go. People pick on things that are different. If you’re already asking if this will happen, you already know that’s true. I’m not going to lie to you.”
I didn’t leave it hanging there, of course. I walked through clear, simple rules we could both stick to, no vague platitudes. First, I told her the difference between being bullied and just someone having a bad day. If a kid calls you a name once in the hallway because they’re mad they failed a test, that’s a jerk having a bad day. That’s not bullying. Bullying is when it’s intentional, it happens more than once, and they do it when they think no adult will see. Naming that takes a lot of the weight off, I think—kids don’t have to turn every rude comment into a big crisis, but they also don’t get to dismiss real harm as just “someone being mean.”
Then the rules: First, you don’t have to be nice. No one expects you to kill anyone with kindness, or turn the other cheek, or be the bigger person. If someone says something to you, you can yell “Stop” loud enough for the teacher at the end of the hall to hear. You can walk away immediately. You can push them away if they touch your stuff. You don’t owe anyone politeness when they’re hurting you.
Second rule: You don’t have to handle it alone. We made a list of three people she can go to, any time, no questions asked. Ms. Henderson, her art teacher who also collects vintage Sanrio stickers, room 214. Mr. Torres, the librarian who lets her sit in the back and sort stickers during lunch, by the main entrance. And me, text me any time, I’ll come get you even if it’s just 20 minutes into the school day. We wrote all the room numbers on the inside cover of her planner, in neon pink marker so she can’t miss it.
Third rule: It’s never your fault. Even if you snapped and yelled back, even if you wore something you know they’ll tease you about, even if you didn’t walk away fast enough. None of that gives someone the right to bully you.
It’s mid-October now, three months into the school year. It’s not like we’ve had no issues. Some boys in PE still call her Shrimp sometimes. She yelled “Stop calling me that” loud enough two weeks ago that the PE coach heard, and made the boys sit out the next round of dodgeball. Someone taped a mean note about her stickers to her locker last month. She peeled it off, walked straight to Ms. Henderson’s room, and they threw it in the trash together before buying orange soda from the vending machine.
She comes home some days and slumps on the couch and doesn’t want to talk about it. She eats two chocolate chip cookies and does her homework and that’s that. She still brings her sticker album to school every Friday to trade with the other 7th grade sticker kid she met in art class. She still wears her Hello Kitty rain boots even after a group of girls laughed at them in the cafeteria last week.
I see so many parents act like telling kids bullying might happen is going to scare them, or make them think it’s unavoidable. But the alternative is lying, and lying makes kids feel alone when it does happen. When my mom told me it wouldn’t happen, I thought I had to fix it myself, that I’d brought it on by being too awkward, by not getting contacts, by talking too much about my comic books. I didn’t tell anyone how bad it got until I was almost 30.
The quiet thing no one talks about is that most kids who ask this question already know they stick out. They’re already asking because they can feel the gap between how they fit and what everyone else expects. Lying to them just makes them less likely to come to you when it starts.
You don’t have to promise it’ll all be okay, not if you don’t know that for sure. What you can do is give them clear, small things they can hold onto: a short list of safe adults they actually like, permission to prioritize their own comfort over being polite, and the truth that if it happens, it’s not a failure on their part. It’s just something that happens, and you’ll handle it together.
Last night, Lila asked if we could order new sticker album pages online. She showed me the new set she traded for, a 1990s set of Disney stickers that still have the original adhesive. She didn’t mention the girls laughing at her boots. I didn’t either. We added the pages to her cart, and she went back to watching her clay tutorial on YouTube. It’s not perfect. There will probably be worse days ahead. But the secret shame I carried? She doesn’t have that. And that’s enough, for now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What To Do When Your Kid Asks If They Will Get Bullied At School