DEEP DIVE: When Your Kid is Being Bullied

0:28We always recommend Shopify. That's rude. It's not nice. It's not bullying. What fresh hell laughing in the face of motherhood. Nobody sees their role in bullying correctly with Margaret Aples and Amy Wilson. Oh, isn't it interesting to find out how the worm turns a podcast that solves today's parenting dilemmas. So you don't have to you hone yourself and smooth every edge to fit in exactly that shape. Hello, everyone, and welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. And this week, we're talking about bullies. Oh, bullies. Bullying, being bullied.

1:12A couple weeks ago, we talked about when kids have trouble making friends and kind of came from the point of view of when your kid is maybe doing something wrong, not being their own best advocate in the friend-making space and how to help them with that. This is the other end. This is somebody's coming at your kid with unwelcome aggression. And how do you know when it's something that they need help with? And then how do you help? It's super tricky. Yeah. And I have to say, one of the hardest of all the things, I think, like from an emotional level, when you have a kid who you love and adore and think hung the moon and people are giving them a really hard time based on like their weakest qualities.

1:56I think it just brings out the mama bear. And I think it's painful. Like of the things I have really like cried about as a parent, this is up there. Just someone being mean to your kid stinks. Judith Warner wrote a book called And Then They Stopped Talking To Me. It came out about five years ago and about middle school and about relational aggression, which we're going to talk about. And her whole point, the interview is excellent. I'll link to it in the show notes. Her whole point is that when this stuff comes around again, it does trigger memories of having been this kid for yourself. And it's really hard to watch your kid go through it.

2:37And so that becomes part of the thing you have to watch for before you go lioness or mama bear and call the other parent. You know what I mean? You need to figure out how much of this story is you reliving your 11 year old lunch money being stolen story. Oh, a lot of it. And I had a couple of years of bad bullying. I will say I have also been the participant in bullying at some points in my life. And then I have a sister who had a bullying situation that was bad enough that she had to change schools at one point. So like, and I remember it. It's one of those like seared, vivid childhood memories that is like the feeling, the helpless and upset feeling I had about it as a child on behalf of my sister is just very vivid for me.

3:30It stinks. It's so hard. I lost a year of high school to being bullied and, you know, not wanting to go to school and stomach aches every day and nobody's talking to me. And I definitely globalized it. You know, a couple of girls were being mean to me and stopped speaking to me, you know, and started shunning me. And I went to a big public high school. And I think most kids were dimly aware this was occurring or not aware this was occurring. But to me, it was the top story in the news. Everybody knows not to talk to me. And I think some kids were like, I better not talk to her because there's some beef and I'm not getting on the wrong side of that.

4:03So I'm just going to ignore her also. Whatever's going on with her, she's kryptonite. Right, right. Stay away from the kryptonite. But then there were other kids who were like, I'm late for math class. Like they were not, you know, they were not clued into this. But to me, It was like, you know, Game of Thrones, like the shame walk every day at school. That's what's happening. Everybody knows that nobody's supposed to talk to me. And climbing out of that is really hard. Absolutely. And I think that bullying is the kind of thing that it feels like, like, oh, it's little rascals and kids with your lunch money.

4:33But I went to a large public school as well, where there were situations where there were kids who had facial differences, illnesses, who were relentlessly tortured and bullied. Like, it's hard to even look back on how bad it was. And I know at least two adults who are involved in PTSD counseling around how bad the bullying was for them in high school. And gosh, I hope it is changing to a certain there is a little bit more awareness around it. But I mean, this can be absolutely damaging and relentless. And I do think that back in our day, there was a little bit of like, kids will be kids. And that's not really the parents fault and problem.

5:23And see if this is familiar to you. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. That was the advice when you're like, nobody's speaking to me as I walked through the hallways. That's sticks and stones. Let me lay this one on you. I'm rubber and you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you. Remarkably ineffective. No, doesn't work. Not actually the answer to bullying, as it turns out. The other thing I will say about bullying is that this is really just occurring to me as we talk about it. But this has been a construct that's been useful to me in other ways on the podcast.

5:57It is something very unique to childhood in the way that it happens, that you have to get up and go to a place all day, every day, where there are people who have devoted their lives to making your life a living hell by torturing you verbally. Like, it's just at work, you would go to HR if this was happening. You know, if I do think that there is adult bullying, I do think that there are like mom friend cliques where they ice people out, and it can be very damaging. And But the completely sealed environment of a school where you're walking in to spend eight hours against your will with a group of people, I think, is a unique to childhood situation.

6:40So here's an interesting statistic. Sharice Nixon, she's a psychologist. She researches bullying as part of her work with adolescents. 7 % of kids that she has studied in her research report experiencing physical aggression on a daily or weekly basis, like give me your lunch money kind of bullying, right? Being pushed into lockers, kind of bullying. But 50 % of kids in grades 5 through 12 have experienced relational aggression at least monthly. And relational aggression, it's interesting as you and I are talking about bullying and what's so hard and my experience and your sister's experience, it's relational aggression.

7:16aggression. It's not being punched in the face. It's being shunned. It's being, you know, being told that you're ugly with that kind of thing. That relational aggression is really, really common and harder to detect from the outside, I think, for teachers and coaches and things to see that it's happening. Yeah. And it feels like it isn't the relational aggression is an interesting term because it does feel like it is an age of young people coming into a very certain kind of power, right? That it happens in this very way of like, I can't control much, but the six of us can turn our backs whenever Amy walks in the room and like, it lights you up.

7:58It feels good on some level. I was this kid. So like, as you were saying before, I've been on both sides of this. And it took me a long time to come to terms with that, that I have been the bullied and the bullier and And definitely when I was in middle school and I was like, OK, you guys, we all have to stop talking to this kid because she's holding us back. I definitely thought that I was acting in the best interest of myself socially and the rest of the people because she was, you know, she was a loser. She was weird and she always wanted to talk about weird things and we can't be friends with her anymore because we have to.

8:29It seemed essential to me and her feelings did not enter the picture. And it lasted, I will say, my own defense. It lasted like a week. but even that's not on my own defense it lasted a week because the other girls came to me like this is too mean we can't do it and i'm like okay fine we can we stopped mafia done amy wilson i didn't have the votes you know they were like we don't have the stomach for this wilson i tried to the speaker and i didn't have the votes in the end so yeah i was overruled yeah so that's not really in my defense wow and then did anyone turn on you as a result oh isn't it interesting to find out how the worm turns.

9:04Yes. Who do you think was one of the chief architects of my junior year disaster? The same girl. Same girl. The one you tried to oust. The one I tried to oust. It's Game of Thrones out there, people. It's Game of Thrones. It took me decades to be like, I did it to her first. I didn't realize it until I was definitely 30. As they say, if you're gonna shoot for the queen, you better kill the queen. Because if you leave her wounded, you left her wounded and she came back. She was not the queen in seventh grade. And then all of a sudden, you know, in 11th, 12th grade, she was on the homecoming court.

9:39You know, she would things that stuff happens. I was telling my daughter that my daughter's in high school now. And of course, you know, this stuff is a frequent topic of discussion. And then I said, like, okay, in six months, this is going to be different. The planets and stars just move through the sky, things are going to shift. I know it feels like everything is this can't change and this has to be this way and you can't talk to this one because they're in that friend group. I'm like, you're right. It feels that way. Now it won't feel that way. In six months, things are just going to change even if you don't do anything.

10:08But I understand that right now it feels immutable and impossible. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think in we've told stories on the podcast before about being bullied. And I remember people kind of reaching out to us because now in this world, we're coming from the point of view of like, we have a podcast and we're the people talking into the mics and we seem like we have a lot of answers or have it together in some way. And the idea to some people that both of us were the complete social outcasts who were getting the absolute brunt of the bullying was interesting in and of itself. But that's right.

10:46Like, yeah, I, in some neighboring school, there was a girl who was she was on a tv show i think a soap opera or something and it seemed like she should be the most popular kid in school and she was from all right right bully like it's difference at that age is so bad and people were like what kind of freak is on tv you know i mean what a weird thing to pick out about somebody and i'm like wouldn't you want to be friends with a kid who's on tv you can go and eat their craft services but it's just hard to say well did she think she was great? I mean, I don't know all the details. I just know that she had a terrible time at school.

11:24Sometimes in schools, the goal is to become like the perfectly sanded block of wood that fits in perfectly with all the other, the perfectly, not even plain. It's like whatever the shape is, you hone yourself and smooth every edge to fit in exactly that shape. And that somehow Now, being on TV made you different than that shape and being fat made you different from in that shape. Not living in a nice house makes you different from that shape. Having an accent, eating strange lunch that your parents from a different country prepared, like your inability to hone yourself into that perfect shape.

11:59And also, I think in a more complicated way, as a mom of kids who have some differences that are personality differences, like your obsession with the biomes of the world that you want to talk about 20 hours a day, or your extremely adorable, passionate interest in the planet Mars, you know, or whatever the difference might be. you're not in the perfect shape and therefore you must be destroyed is some sort of weird instinct that kids have. And girls more than boys. I actually looked into this because the stereotype of relational aggression is mean girls, right? And I was, I thought, is that, is that an unfair stereotype?

12:46Do boys do this? And so I did, you know, did a little dig on this and turns out, yes, we experts do say this is more common in girls than in boys. And the reason they suggest is because girls are more verbal and verbal at an earlier age that they tend to relate in verbal ways and boys are maybe a little more bam bam and tend to relate in more physical ways make of that what you will but i did dig and try to find that it was you know a sexist stereotype that only girls do this and the research seems to kind of bear out yeah this is more often girls than boys than do the relational aggression part more often not never yeah the like i think boys is probably the physical aggression part a little bit more, right?

13:28Like, doesn't that seem to track? Yes. Well, when I was in high school, I had this tough year, ended up hanging around with boys. Do you remember the show Square Pegs? Old Deluxe Alert? Back in my day. I mean, do I remember? Would you like me to recite several episodes of the... Would you like me to sing this Square Pegs? Square Pegs? Square? Square? Pegs? Theme song? I mean, what do you want? Starring Sarah Jessica Parker as a teenager, or like 20s, playing a teenager or something, before Sex and the City. And she was the square peg and Muffy Tepperman was the popular girl. And played by? Oh, Jamie Gertz.

14:01Jamie Gertz, correct. And Sarah Jessica Parker hung around. It was kind of like Pretty in Pink or any of these things. Well, I mean, look at our example. Now Sarah Jessica Parker stars on the show about like the most attractive woman in New York City, basically. It's funny. But she wore glasses on square pegs, see? So she was ugly. Can I tell you a quick fun fact? Yes. We went on the Universal Studios tour when we were, whenever Square Pegs was on, we were so into it. And there was Sarah Jessica Parker was like the film on the bus that plays, you know, like it's like they make them film little things for the tourists on the bus.

14:33And she's like, here's a fun fact about me. And she took her braces off. They were like fake retainer braces. And my sister and I were like, what? And we still talk about it to this day. We use that as like a touchstone metaphor where like when something really surprising happens, I'll say to my sister, it was a Sarah Jessica Parker taking off her braces moment. Sarah Jessica Parker also had her natural hair in square pegs, which was it was before flat irons. It was not a beautiful head of hair. It was a large head of hair, though. Anyway, so she's only friends with boys on square pegs. And that's how I was.

15:05And I remember my friend who was a boy who wanted me around sometimes. And sometimes he wanted to, like, go hit on girls. So I was not, you know, it's not always the right sidekick for him. But he always felt like, just go punch X in the face. Just go walk up to her and just punch her in the stomach. And that will bring an end to this. And I look back on this. jailhouse style. And of course I couldn't do it and I didn't do it. And I look back and I wonder if my friend Neil might've had a point. We'll be right back. Hey there, I'm Kendra Adachi and my show, The Lazy Genius Podcast, helps you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

15:40And you get to decide what matters. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to give you a new way to see. Episodes of The Lazy Genius Podcast are full of compassionate time management tips and permission slips to do what makes sense for you. New episodes drop every Monday. Follow and listen to the Lazy Genius podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so usually in part one, we were fired up about bullies, but usually in part one, we try to define the problem. And we, so I think we should take a second to define what bullying is, because I think especially with bullying, I do find myself on occasion saying to my children, that's not bullying, because they're like, oh, I got bullied today.

16:24Someone said they didn't like my dress. I'm like, okay, wait a minute. That's not bullying. So let's define what bullying is. This is Signa Whitson. I'll put the link to her in the show notes. This is what she does. She's a national speaker on bullying. She talks about it all the time. And she has this excellent sort of framework, I think excellent, of breaking down, is it rude, is it mean, or is it bullying? Because I think not only do kids rush to that, but parents rushed to that too. Like my kid was bullied. So something that's rude. This was a very useful example she gave. If something's rude, it's spontaneous, it's thoughtless, it's maybe poor manners, but it's not actually intended to, you know, ruin somebody's life.

17:05The example she gives is somebody comes into her and says, my daughter was bullied. And she says, what happened? And I'm like, she was getting off the bus and this boy threw a handful of leaves at daughter of you know like in the fall threw leaves at her can you imagine and she says has this boy done this to her before like well no but you can bet it'll never happen again because I'm putting a stop to this bullying and she's like well what did your daughter do well she threw some leaves back at him and then what happened the next day oh they just rode the bus like okay that's we need a little sound effect that's not bullying that's rude it's not nice it's not bullying yeah and another kind kind of stem off of that tree branch, shall we say, is a lot of questions.

17:47And so Britt Hawthorne talks about this in one of our episodes, Curious Questions. So there are kids who might have differences that kids ask questions about. That's also not bullying. We can talk to kids about what's appropriate. It is certainly not a kid's job who has any kind of difference to spend their entire lives explaining themselves to the world. Right. Being the ambassador for right limb differences, being the ambassador and being the person who explains like why I have a limb difference all day, every day to everyone who asks, because that's just a curious question. So that might be something to like work with educators around.

18:25But kids asking questions about other kids is not. Yeah. Or even if they're like, you know, what is your lunch smell weird? That is that's rude. That's rude. Rude. But that's what I mean. It's not that it's okay. It's just not bullying. All right. So let's go one more step to mean. The signal wits and says, okay, mean is one more step. Mean is purposefully saying or doing something to hurt somebody once or maybe twice. And the example that she gives is, are you seriously wearing that sweater again? Didn't you just wear it on Tuesday? That's mean. That's intended to hurt. It's nasty. It's still not bullying.

19:01She argues. You're a weirdo. Mean. Yeah. But it's still not bullying. She says bullying is intentionally aggressive behavior repeated over time that involves an imbalance of power. The bullying has to entail three key elements. There's an intent to harm. There's that power imbalance, repeated acts or threats of aggressive behavior or threats, right? So you get pushed into a locker or I'm going to push you into a locker if you don't give me your lunch money. and no regret or remorse when the victim expresses their hurt. That is such a good definition. I want to go back to something I said because I was talking about curious questions.

19:39That's kind of off this line entirely. All three of these things, rudeness, meanness and bullying are unacceptable. They're not OK. So you would correct somebody. I think a truly curious question is like, OK, there might be a better way to ask that or this is why this is not this person's obligation to answer. that's probably harmless rudeness which is like belching in someone's face don't do that it's rude saying you're a weirdo you shouldn't do that it's mean bullying is just it's farther down the line but I think the idea of intentionally aggressive repeated over time imbalance of power is a really interesting triangle to think about with bullying.

20:25An imbalance of power could be two fourth graders, but one who's got, you know, six friends picking on one who has maybe not as many. It's and it can be so hard to see from the outside. I'm not going to name names, but one of my kids was in pre-K and there was a kid in their pre-K class who ruled the coat room, you know, like the area, the pegs where they hang up. Oh man. This kid. Not the coat room queen. That's tough. And I would hear about it from my child. This kid determined who was allowed to talk to who, who could be in the block corner and who could be in the dress up corner. Cersei Lannister of the coat room, basically.

21:00Yes, nothing got past this kid. I'm sure the teachers were totally unaware it was happening. Well, I know they were. And it was because there was a little bit of a vacuum. The usual teacher was out on maternity leave. And so the less experienced teacher who had replaced that teacher, I think was a little more oblivious to just how much time was being spent whispering in the coat room area of the pre-k. Anyway, two kids from that class did not come back for kindergarten. Two kids left out of a class of like 15 because it was like so rough to show up every day, the mean streets of this pre-k. And who wants to deal with Cersei Lannister of the coat room every morning before you've even had your snack?

21:36Yeah. And it was like four or five-year-olds. And of course, five years later, that kid is not running anything, you know, but it's this weird moment in time that can occur. And to the people who are in it, I guess this is the part that's important, that power imbalance can exist, even if it's completely imperceptible or mostly imperceptible to the adult, right? Like you'd look at this and be like, why is this kid getting to say who you can play with? What are you talking about? But to the kids, it was ironclad and real. And real for everybody involved. And I do think there's a complicating factor with bullying, that is good kids, bad kids, and that bullying is very complicated.

22:17And what I have seen play out in my kids' school is kids who are bullied become the bullies later on. Kids who are the square peg to teachers, like they're kind of the difficult kid, become bullies later on because they need some source of power. You know, some kids are just like, these are just my friends and we're just having fun. Like, we're just like this and we just really don't like her and we're expressing that and that's our right. But like, nobody sees their role in bullying correctly is what I'm trying to say. It doesn't mean it's an excuse. It doesn't mean that bullies are actually great people at heart.

23:01It doesn't mean any of that. It's just that it's more complicated than I have known situations where I would have clearly identified someone as the bully and then had a conversation with their parent. And they're like, it's so hard for him school because he's constantly bullied. And I'm like, wait a minute, I totally picture your kid as like the like, kids stealing lunch money. And I think that the, what is it? The constellation of bullying is very hard. And I know people who are school administrators, and I think it is very, very challenging. Everybody sees it very much from their own point of view.

23:44So let's talk about helping kids who are being bullied. Let's do that. That seems hard. And I think, you know, knowing the difference, Like, where are we on these steps is very different to sort of calibrate your response and help the kid calibrate their response. Yeah, I have a kid who as a younger person had a little you can print them out online now. And it if the question was, how big is this problem? And it would be like, it's a huge problem. Like someone, you know, something terrible has happened or like you've lost something precious and calibrating the problem of bullying. and it was a visual thing to help kind of be like, how big is this problem?

24:23Really? I think calibrating bullying is the first step. Probably this is ironic, but if your kid is coming home and the first thing they say and they throw it down their backpack is like, Billy's being mean, you know, then you, that is probably an indication, not that you shouldn't discuss it and help your kid with it, but that it's probably not bullying because Katie Hurley, who's a psychotherapist who works with adolescents, points out that the kids who are being the most bullied kind of go in internal and don't come home and say, I'm being bullied every day. I'm really scared. I'm really unhappy.

24:57I know I didn't. I brought it up once in a while to my parents and then my parents didn't really know what to do. Right. It is hard to know what to do with these situations. And I stopped talking about it, which didn't mean it wasn't in the forefront of my mind 24 seven. But what was the point of talking about it? And so there might be cases where your kid is being bullied and the you're gonna have to clue into that for reasons besides them coming home and telling you. Yeah. And man, there's some projection that goes on here too, because I think that often we have certain kids who we worry about with this, like, oh no, they're so, you know, different and they're so expressive or they're, you know, on the spectrum and they have some strange behaviors and I know they're going to get bullied and that we miss sometimes like our kid who is a go along get along kid and maybe doing well in school and a strong student who it's like, oh, Sally can handle anything.

25:53I don't really worry about her. Like, if you're seeing that quietness, something might be going on. So Katie Hurley says school refusal, wanting to quit activities, avoiding peer interactions, stomach aches, not being able to sleep, you know, that kind of stuff. You might want to, you know, find out a little more. And then once you get them to open up, let's talk about what not to say. This is Sherry Gordon is a bullying prevention advocate. Whatever you do, if your kid opens up to you, like the kids are being mean to me, you lead with empathy and you don't tell them what they need to be doing differently than what they're doing.