Why Are So Many Parents So Worried About Their Kid Being Bullied, And What We Can Actually Do
It’s 9:17 PM, my 10-year-old’s been in bed 20 minutes, my chamomile tea’s gone lukewarm, and his grass-stained soccer cleats are still propped by the front door where he left them. I’m scrolling the local parent sub I check a few times a week when a new thread pops up: “Why is everyone in this sub so worried about getting bullied?” The first hundred comments roll in fast. One says “I was bullied through middle school, I wake up sweating thinking about my kid going through the same.” Another says “I check my daughter’s Snapchat every single night before I go to bed. If I don’t, I can’t sleep.” A third says “My son just started kindergarten and I already have the principal’s email saved in my contacts for when it happens.” I recognize that tight chest feeling immediately. I’ve felt it too.
I got tripped in the lunch line in seventh grade. My strawberry applesauce flew out of my container, all down the front of my white Catholic school uniform, and the whole table behind me laughed so hard one kid snort-laughed soda out his nose. I cleaned myself up in the bathroom stall and never told anyone. When my mom asked why my shirt was stained that night, I said I’d tripped over my own feet on the playground. I still remember the hot shame of it, 25 years later. So when my son started elementary school, I found myself asking him every single afternoon, “Did anyone bully you today?” He’d just shrug and say “No” and grab a granola bar, and I’d spend the rest of the night spiraling, wondering what he wasn’t telling me.
Last spring, my son’s best friend came over after school, red-eyed, because a group of boys from his class had made a fake TikTok account pretending to be him and posted silly, mean clips making fun of his buck teeth. When I was a kid, the bullying ended when I walked through my front door. That kid couldn’t escape it. He checked his phone every 10 minutes to see if more people had liked the mean clips. His mom had to go to the school, get the account taken down, and even then, kids were still whispering about it at recess for a week. That’s the big difference I see between when I was a kid and now, the thing that makes the worry so much bigger for us: bullying doesn’t stay at school anymore. It comes home with them, in their pockets, on their screens.
It’s not just social media, though. Most of the comments I see aren’t even about current bullying. They’re about our own old bullying. We carry that unprocessed shame with us, and we project it onto our kids. We’ve also picked up this quiet idea that if bad things happen to our kid, it means we failed somehow— that we didn’t raise them tough enough, that we didn’t pick the right school, that there’s something wrong with them or with us. When my son came home a few months ago and mentioned a kid called him weird for still bringing his favorite T-Rex toy in his backpack for show and tell, I immediately spiraled. I thought, Oh no, I should have told him to leave it at home, this is going to turn into him getting picked on every day. Then I realized: my son didn’t even care. He just mentioned it like it was a minor annoying thing, the kid called me weird, whatever, can we have pizza for dinner? The panic was all mine, from when I got called weird for bringing dinosaur toys to school when I was his age. I had to pause and separate my old baggage from his current experience.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve shifted a few small habits that have cut down on my own constant worrying and helped my son feel more comfortable talking to me if something is wrong. The first change was simple: I stopped asking “Did anyone bully you today?” That question is too big, too loaded, it puts kids on the spot and makes them shut down. Now I ask small, specific, low-stakes questions every day. “Who did you sit next to at lunch today?” “What was the dumbest thing that happened in class this week?” “Who made you laugh the hardest today?” If something’s off, they’ll bring it up. A few weeks ago, my son mentioned offhand that the same kid who took his colored pencils last year was leaving mean sticky notes on his locker, and that’s how I found out, instead of him hiding it because I was grilling him every day.
The second shift I made is that when he does tell me about someone being mean, I don’t immediately grab my phone to email the principal. I first ask, “What do you want to do about this?” When the colored pencil theft started, I wanted to email the teacher right away. But my son said he just wanted to tell the kid to stop, and keep his pencil case in his backpack instead of on his desk. We practiced what he’d say once in the car on the way to school—just “Stop taking my stuff, it’s not yours” — and he did it, and it stopped. He got to practice solving a problem on his own, instead of me stepping in and taking that confidence away from him. If he’d said he wanted me to talk to the teacher, I would have, no question. But letting him lead means he builds skills to handle small issues before they blow up into something bigger.
I still get that tight chest feeling sometimes, when I drop him off for the first day of a new grade, or when he’s quiet in the car after school. I still scroll those parent threads and nod along to every comment, because I get the worry. It doesn’t go away completely. But I’ve learned that most of the time, the worry says more about us than it does about our kids. We don’t have to eliminate every bad thing that happens to them to keep them safe. We just have to leave the door open for them to tell us about it when it happens. It’s messy, and some days the panic still creeps in, but this slow, quiet approach works far better than all the overthinking I used to do.
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