Why ‘Will My Kid Get Bullied?’ Parent Group Posts Are Not Helpful And What To Do Instead
Last Tuesday, I was folding Lila’s new high school gym uniforms at the kitchen table, scrolling the closed freshman parent group I joined a month prior, when two posts popped up back to back. First: “My daughter is super quiet and loves anime, will she get bullied here? Be honest.” Second: “My son is small for his age, is the freshman locker bay a bullying hotspot? Looking for real answers.” I froze, half-folded uniform in my hand, because I’d had a draft of almost the exact same post sitting in my notes app for three weeks.
Lila got tangled up in a mean friend group in seventh grade. She came home crying three nights a week for a month, after girls left her off party invites and posted snarky comments about her old braces on their stories. I’ve carried that tight, anxious feeling in my chest ever since, so when we got her high school assignment back in March, my first instinct was to run to the internet and ask the question everyone asks: what’s the real deal with bullying here?
But that night, I sat and read through the comment thread on those two posts, and I remembered why I never hit send on my draft. Half the commenters said the school was completely safe, no bullying to speak of, anyone who says different is overreacting. The other half shared their worst horror stories from five, ten, even fifteen years ago, saying parents need to be careful, the administration covers everything up. Within an hour, it devolved into a fight: one mom called the other fearmongering, the other called the first willfully ignorant. No one walked away with anything useful. The original posters deleted their posts an hour later, probably more stressed than they were when they wrote them.
That night, Lila was sitting on the counter eating a blue popsicle, waiting for her laundry to dry, so I showed her the posts. She rolled her eyes, sticky juice dripping down her wrist, and said, “Why would a random stranger know if I’ll get bullied? They don’t even know me.” She’s not wrong. Most people in these parent groups don’t know each other. Most don’t even have kids currently in the school, or have kids with completely different personalities and social needs than yours. A parent who has a loud, outgoing football player isn’t going to have the same experience as a parent of a quiet queer kid who likes to draw, and vice versa.
I started thinking about why these posts pop up so much, and why groups are always debating whether to ban them entirely. The fear isn’t wrong. Any parent who’s watched their kid come home hurt knows that twist of worry, that urge to get any answer that makes it feel more manageable. But the question itself is broken. Asking “will my kid get bullied here” is a yes/no question that no one can answer. Bullying can happen anywhere, to any kid, at any time. No school is completely free of it, and no school is overrun with it. All you get from asking that question to hundreds of strangers is a flood of other people’s trauma and bias, which does nothing but amp up your own anxiety before your kid even steps through the door.
I realized a few months back that I was walking around on edge around Lila, talking in hushed tones about “watching out for mean kids” and asking her every night if anyone had been rude to her at summer camp, and she started getting more nervous. She started asking me every night, “Do you think I’ll get bullied?” All my worrying was rubbing off on her, all because I couldn’t work through my own anxiety from her seventh grade year, and from my own bad high school experience getting bullied for my cystic acne.
Instead of posting my question to the group, I texted my neighbor Jen, whose kid just finished freshman year at the same school. Jen’s kid is also quiet, loves drawing, same vibe as Lila, and I trust her to tell it straight. I didn’t ask if there was bullying. I asked, “What’s one thing that helped your kid feel settled the first month?” She wrote back 10 minutes later: “Sent him to the art club open house the first week. All the kids who don’t fit the sports/popular vibe go. He met his best friend there, never had any issues.” That one answer was more useful than 100 comment thread replies about bullying.
It’s not that these posts need to be banned outright, exactly, but they do need to be redirected. For group admins, instead of deleting posts and banning people for asking, just pin a list of better questions to the top of the group. Things like, “What programs does the school have to support kids when conflict comes up?” or “What’s one thing you wish you’d known before your kid started?” or “Where do kids with [specific interest] tend to hang out?” For parents, next time you feel that urge to post the question, text one or two people you actually trust who know your kid and know the school, instead of asking 400 strangers.
And when your kid asks you “will I get bullied?” don’t just say “no, that won’t happen” and don’t immediately jump into calling the principal. Try this: ask “What’s the scariest part of that for you right now?” When Lila asked me that last week, she told me she was terrified of standing alone in the lunch room looking for a seat, that everyone would stare at her. Instead of promising it wouldn’t happen, we made a plan. We put the art teacher’s cell number in her phone, we agreed that if she can’t find a seat, she can text me and I’ll bring her a cookie and we can eat in the car for lunch. We practiced what she can say if someone says something rude: “That’s not cool, I’m leaving.” It’s not a guarantee nothing bad will ever happen, but it’s something she can hold onto when she feels nervous.
I still get that twisted anxious feeling some nights when I scroll the parent group. Lila still has days where she says she’s scared to start. I deleted my draft post months ago, though. We have a plan, we have a contact at the school, we know where the art club meets. That’s enough, for now.
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