Sometimes it all starts with a note on the electronic register, a phone call from the school, a sentence said by the teacher on the way out. “He made fun of a classmate”, “he excluded him from the group”, “he scared him”, “he continues even when the other asks him to stop”. That ugly silence falls in the house, that of the parents who for a few seconds look for a more comfortable explanation. It must have been a game. He will have been provoked. It will be a phase. Then the fact remains, small and unpleasant as a crumb under the table: a child can hurt another child even when he grows up in a family convinced of teaching him kindness.
Bullying in children rarely comes out of nowhere. It needs repetition, an imbalance of strength, a gesture that returns and becomes a method. It can be physical, verbal, social, digital. It can go from a push, from a nickname, from a rumor spread, from a chat in which someone is left out on purpose. The definitions used by organizations dealing with prevention insist on three concrete elements: intention, repetition and power. And they remember something that adults often forget: bullying also hurts those who do it, because it teaches them to live in the world using control, fear, shame and superiority as normal relationship tools.
The house leaves traces
The family scene weighs more than we like to admit. A child observes everything: the tone with which adults argue, the way one silences the other, the jokes made in front of guests, the apologies that never arrive, the sarcasm passed off as character, the screams then archived with a “past it all”. It also absorbs what no one calls violence because it seems ordinary: talking down, making fun of a fragility, transforming a mistake into humiliation, punishing without explaining, ignoring a cry because you are in a hurry.
Research on parenting styles does not say that a strict parent automatically creates a bully. It would be a poor shortcut. It says something more useful and more uncomfortable: the way adults hold together rules, warmth, listening and limits influences their children’s ability to manage anger, frustration and social relationships. The authoritative style, the one made up of clear boundaries and a warm relationship, is associated with the healthiest outcomes: more self-regulation, more trust, better management of emotions. The authoritarian, rigid and punitive style can instead encourage aggression, low self-esteem and decision-making fatigue; the neglectful one often leaves their children alone in front of their emotions; one that is too permissive can make it more difficult to learn the limit.
Inside this picture comes a word that seems technical but instead concerns the kitchen table: validation. A child who says “I’m angry”, “I’m scared”, “I’m ashamed”, “I feel excluded” is bringing adults raw material. It can be worked on, named, contained. Or it can be thrown away with a quick phrase: “you’re exaggerating”, “stop it”, “be good”, “it was just a joke”, “come on, laugh too”. When this happens every now and then, we are in the realm of human fatigue. When it becomes climate, the child learns precise grammar: emotions disturb, vulnerability exposes, those with power decide what counts.
A much-cited review of the family’s role in the development of emotional regulation describes three channels through which children learn to manage what they feel: they observe adults, receive specific responses to their emotions, and experience the emotional climate of the home, including parenting style, attachment, family expressiveness, and the relationship between parents. Translated without shirts: children learn to calm down even by watching how adults calm down.
Here bullying in children encounters a less spectacular root than large school campaigns. A child who feels small, invisible, or constantly corrected may look elsewhere for a feeling of strength. At school he finds someone shyer, more isolated, slower, stranger in the eyes of the group. And there he tries to become great in the worst way: by making someone else feel small. Studies of family characteristics associated with bullying perpetration have found a protective role in parent-child communication, knowledge of children’s friends, and academic encouragement. Where the report is more readable, the risk tends to be reduced.
“Be strong” doesn’t always make you strong
Then there is a phrase that many adults pronounce with the best intention in the world: “be strong”. Its rougher cousin is “stop crying.” The gender version, still alive in many homes, sounds worse: “be a man.” It sounds like resistance education. It often becomes closing training.
The problem lies in the message below the sentence. The child feels that the emotion is wrong, that the body must recompose itself quickly, that asking for help weighs on others. When he grows up he can become an efficient, tidy, even brilliant person. Outside holds everything together. Inside it remains without instructions. Several studies on emotional socialization show that unsupportive parental responses towards their children’s negative emotions are associated, in adults’ memory, with lower emotional regulation skills and more dysfunctional strategies, such as emotional suppression. In a study of young adults, the perception of unsupportive parental responses during childhood was linked to greater use of maladaptive strategies and trait anxiety.
Other work on childhood emotional invalidation has linked parents’ punishment, minimization and discomfort in the face of their children’s negative emotions to greater emotional inhibition in adulthood; this inhibition, in turn, predicted psychological distress, including anxious and depressive symptoms. Here too, caution is needed: samples, contexts and methods have limits. But the drawing is consistent with what many therapists see every day: a child who is silenced long enough can become an adult who silences himself.
In males the script is often narrower. Crying becomes weakness, asking for comfort becomes shame, saying “he hurt me” almost becomes a loss of status. Some cultural norms linked to masculinity soon teach us to separate ourselves from the tender, relational, vulnerable part. Harvard has taken up the work of developmental psychologist Niobe Way on precisely this: many kids, as they grow up, go from the desire for intimate and deep friendships to emotional closure, under the pressure of models that reward autonomy, toughness and self-sufficiency.
From there seven very recognizable adult habits can arise: anger used as the main language, hyper-independence, avoidance of painful topics, self-invalidation, complacency towards others, difficulty understanding one’s own needs, closure. They are not a condemnation and do not belong only to males. They are, more simply, the possible result of years spent learning that feeling too much complicates the lives of others.
The jokes that stick
Many parents invalidate without malice. They do it because they are tired, because no one has taught them another way, because they are repeating phrases they received as children. The classic “just kidding” deserves attention. A joke about the body, about fear, about crying, about shyness, about clumsiness may seem harmless to those who say it. For a child it can become a small label stuck to the skin.
The child who often hears “you’re always the same”, “how heavy you are”, “how touchy”, “if you do that no one can stand you” receives a double lesson. On the one hand, he learns to be ashamed of his own internal states. On the other hand he sees an adult using ridicule as a form of control. Then he comes to class and replicates it on a smaller scale: he finds the most exposed classmate and turns him into the target. Cruelty, before it becomes organized malice, is often a borrowed technique.
The same thing happens with family conflicts. If you scream at home and then pretend nothing happened, a child may confuse repair with removal. If an adult insults and no one comes back to say “I made a mistake”, the gesture remains without care. If one parent speaks badly of the other in front of the children, the child learns that humiliation is a legitimate shortcut. If fear is governed with threats, power becomes synonymous with relationship.
Repair changes a lot. Apologizing to a child without being theatrical, explaining that you raised your voice too much, acknowledging an unfair comment, naming your anger without venting it: these are less flashy gestures than a great moral lesson. They work better. They teach that authority can make mistakes and repair the damage. A healthy family is not one where no one ever loses patience. It’s the one where the mistake doesn’t remain on the floor like a broken glass that everyone pretends not to see.
When the bully is your child
When faced with a child who has bullied someone, panic is understandable and not very useful. Seriousness is needed, without turning the child into a domestic monster. The first move is to understand what really happened: who was there, how many times it happened, what role the others had, what need that behavior was trying to satisfy. Curiosity and determination can be in the same sentence. “What you did is serious. I want to understand what was going on inside you when you did it.” It’s an open door, not an absolution.
Then comes responsibility. A child must learn to apologize, make amends, accept age-appropriate consequences. Consequences serve to connect gesture and impact, not to avenge the adult’s wounded pride. The school must be involved, especially when the behavior is repeated. In some cases, psychological support or an assessment of emotional, relational, neurodevelopmental or family difficulties may be needed. In others, more constant work on language, empathy, rules and presence is enough.
The alternative sentences to the old emotional closures are less brilliant and more tiring. “I see you very angry.” “Tell me what you felt.” “This thing hurt you.” “Let’s find a way to get through without hurting anyone.” “Emotions can be strong, behavior remains your responsibility.” A sentence like this does two jobs at once: it welcomes what the child feels and puts a boundary on what he can do.
Bullying in children can also be prevented in this way, with adults who stop confusing toughness and strength. True strength has a much less spectacular form: a child who manages to say “I’m angry” without having to crush anyone to feel alive. Less theater is needed. More listening is needed when the crying is still small.
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