Children, Parents and School Bullying

We are apt to think that the hurt and misery of children being bullied at school is experienced solely by the targets or victims and that the solution, at least potentially, lies entirely in the hands of teachers and school counselors. If so, we are mistaken. We forget or fail to acknowledge the deep hurt and misery experienced by the parents of victimized children, their anger, despair and frustration as they learn about how their children are being maliciously treated by their peers and do not know what to do.

Over the last ten years I have received many emails and letters from distraught parents of children who were being victimized repeatedly by their peers. Some of these I have incorporated in a book (1). Here, for instance, is a mother telling of her discovery that her 10-year-old daughter was being bullied at school:

My 10-year-old daughter went through hell due to being bullied, and as for people to say it does children no harm is absolutely pathetic. I am totally disgusted in them for even thinking that.

The mother goes on to describe the pain she felt when she became aware of what the bullying was doing to her daughter:

She did not tell me she was being bullied but asked me a question which will haunt me for the rest of my life. The question was: mummy how do parents know that when children kill themselves that they did it because of bullying? I just said they leave a letter, not thinking that she was talking about herself. Two days later I got a phone call from my friend whilst I was at work to tell me my [own] daughter had just been battered and had her head rammed in a wall by 6 girls; then it dawned on me my daughter wanted to kill herself. … I went home and checked her room where I found the letters to say she was sorry and that she loved us. Luckily I found out in time. I had to hide all tablets and medicines, can you imagine how that feels? And then as we were taking her and another girl for a trip to a holiday resort, she asked me to put a song in for her, one I had not heard before, called ‘The happiest day of my life is the day that I die.’’

I talked to the school who did nothing. So I changed schools for her and I have since found out that the [previous] school has been under investigation for bullying. Thank God I found out in time. … I always advise parents to waste no time and get the bullying sorted out asap - because you never know what a child is thinking.

We know from research into what children say that approximately half the children who report that they have been bullied have never told their parents about having been bullied (2). Often such children are too ashamed of themselves to tell anyone; sometimes they feel that no-one can help, not even their parents.

Can parents help and if so, how ? Currently the outcomes reported by children who have told their parents suggest that it is not easy for parents to help. A study based on responses from English schoolchildren has shown that nearly half the children who reported telling family members about it experienced no improvement in their situation, and a minority (13%) reported that matters got worse (2). These are not good odds. Clearly many parents need to know how they can help their children when they discover that they are being bullied at school.