What To Do When Your Kid Asks “Would I Get Bullied At Your School?” A Teacher’s Perspective
Open house last August, I was stacking leftover construction paper on the back table, the fluorescent lights were humming, and most families had already left to grab ice cream down the street. The last mom lingered by the door, twisting her car keys around her finger, and a small boy with a faded Pokemon hoodie hid half behind her legs. When I waved them over, he stepped out and looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Would I get bullied at your school?” His mom went bright red, started to shush him, but he just stood there waiting for an answer.
I didn’t give the answer I used to give 10 years ago: “Of course not, all our kids are kind here.” That’s a lie, I’ve learned. I know it’s not true, and any kid who’s already been bullied knows it’s not true either. I pulled out the extra wooden chair by my desk, asked him to sit, offered him a dinosaur sticker from the jar I keep by the computer. He sat, picked a T-Rex, and I said, “Some years, kids here are mean to each other. It doesn’t happen every day, and it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it can happen. The thing I can tell you for sure is what I’ll do if it happens to you.”
I walked him through the specifics. I keep a blue painted bell on the corner of my desk. If anyone says anything mean to you, or follows you around, or touches your stuff when you tell them not to, you just walk over and tap it once. I don’t care if I’m in the middle of a math lesson or talking to another kid, I’ll come over right away. If it’s one off, I’ll talk to the kid who did it. If it happens again, we’ll move your desk, change your reading group, whatever you need to feel safe. I don’t force people to work it out together if one person is scared. After school, if it happens on the bus or the playground, you can call me from the office, and I’ll stay until you get picked up, or walk you to the front door to meet your mom.
His mom exhaled after that. She told me Miles had been bullied at his last school for his lisp, kids would mimic him when he read out loud, and he’d stopped raising his hand at all completely. She’d tried to talk to the administration there, and they kept saying it was just kids being kids, he needed to grow a thicker skin.
A lot of parents and even teachers get stuck on this idea that we need to teach kids to handle bullying on their own, that asking for help is a failure. I hear parents tell their kids all the time not to be a tattle, and that’s fine for when someone cuts in line or draws on your notebook without asking. But when someone is hurting you on purpose, asking for help isn’t tattling, it’s the right thing to do. And when we lie to kids and say bullying will never happen to them here, we set them up to stay quiet when it does, because they think they’ve somehow broken the school’s nice rule.
Three months into the school year, it happened, just like I said it might. One Tuesday morning during reading out loud, Jake, a kid who sits in the front row, mimicked Miles’s lisp when he stumbled over a word, called him “Miles the Mumble.” The whole class went quiet, everyone looked at Miles. Miles just closed his book, stood up, walked over to my desk, and tapped the blue bell once.
I didn’t make a big screaming scene in front of the whole class. I told the class to keep reading to themselves, walked Jake over to the other empty desk by the window, told him that name-calling isn’t allowed, that he owed Miles an apology after class, and he’d stay there for the rest of the week. At recess, I grabbed an orange popsicle from the teacher lounge freezer and went over to where Miles was playing four square. I asked him if he was okay, if he wanted me to do anything else. He said no, he just wanted to finish his turn. That was that. It never happened again.
But it’s not always that clean, and I don’t pretend it is. Last year, I had a fifth grader named Lila who got bullied for wearing hand-me-down clothes that didn’t have the right brand labels. We moved her desk, talked to the other girls’ parents, changed her lunch table, but they still made snide comments when they passed her in the hallway. It didn’t stop completely, but we made small, steady changes: she started eating lunch in the art room once a week when she didn’t want to deal with it, she started riding home with her aunt instead of the regular bus, and she knew she could always tap the bell if it got worse. That’s enough, most of the time. You don’t have to fix every single mean comment, you just have to make sure the kid knows they don’t have to handle it alone.
For parents whose kids ask this question before the first day of school, the small, concrete steps are always better than empty promises. Don’t panic and don’t lie. You don’t have to say “Of course no one will be mean to you” if that’s not a guarantee you can keep. Instead, say something like “It’s possible someone could be mean, but here’s what we’ll do if that happens: you’ll tell me right away, we’ll talk to the teacher together, and we’ll keep making changes until you feel safe. You won’t have to deal with it by yourself.” If you’re touring schools, ask the principal or teacher what specific steps they take when bullying happens, not just what their posted policy says. Policies sound nice on paper, but what do they actually do when a kid comes to them and says someone is being mean?
Last week, Miles gave me a drawing he made of the blue bell on my desk, with a T-Rex standing next to it. He raised his hand to read out loud just yesterday, stumbled over a word, and laughed when he finished. No one said anything. There’s no way to promise a kid they’ll never be bullied at school, no matter how nice the school is. But you can promise them you’ll show up when they need you. That’s the answer they’re really asking for, anyway.
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