Your child is bullying someone. Tell them what it does to the other child

The call nobody wants#

The school phones. Or another parent does. Or you find the messages yourself.

Your child has been bullying someone.

The first reaction is usually one of three: denial ("not my kid"), minimising ("it's just banter, kids are kids"), or an explosion that is more about your shame than their behaviour. All three feel natural. All three make things worse.

This post is for the parent who has just found out and wants to do it properly. Not to crush your child, and not to wave it away. To address it, and to make sure they understand what they did to another child in terms they can actually take in.

Before you talk to your child#

Do not ambush them in the middle of a row.

• Get the facts first. Ask the school or whoever reported it for specifics: what happened, how often, where, online or in person, who else was involved. One incident and a months-long campaign are different problems.
• Do not contact the other family yourself. Barnardo's advises the parents of a bullied child not to confront the other child's parents, and the same logic works in reverse. Let the school's pastoral or safeguarding team run the contact and any repair, so it does not turn into two families arguing.
• Choose the moment. The NSPCC suggests picking a time when you can give your child your full attention, and some children talk more easily side by side, in the car, than face to face across a table.
• Settle yourself. If you are furious, wait an hour. A calm adult makes it safe to be honest. A furious one teaches them to hide things better.

The conversation#

Keep it plain. Start with the behaviour, not the person.

1. Say what you have been told. "I have been told that you have been excluding and mocking a classmate, and sending messages about them." No drama, no adjectives.
2. Ask for their account and actually listen. You are not looking for a confession to beat them with. You are trying to find out what is going on. Sometimes there is a lot behind it.
3. Do not accept the usual cover stories. "It was a joke." "They started it." "Everyone does it." Hear them, then be clear: if the other person is hurt, scared, or cannot get away from it, it is not a joke.
4. Be unambiguous that it stops. Not "try to be nicer". It stops, and here is what happens to make sure it does.
5. Tell them what it does. This is the part most parents skip. Children, especially younger ones and teenagers still developing empathy, often have no real picture of what happens to a person on the receiving end. The next two sections are that picture. Use plain words.
6. Keep the label off them. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network recommends saying "the child who bullied another student" rather than "the bully", because labels freeze identity and kill any belief that behaviour can change. Say "what you did was cruel", not "you are cruel".

Primary consequences: the direct harm#

Primary consequences are what happens to the child being bullied, directly and soon. When you explain this, you are describing real symptoms that doctors and researchers document.

Children who are bullied are more likely to experience:

• Fear and constant tension. Dreading the bus, the corridor, the group chat, the phone buzzing.
• Anxiety and low mood. StopBullying.gov lists depression and anxiety disorders, changes in sleep and eating, and loss of interest in things they used to enjoy.
• Shame and damaged self-esteem. Bullying teaches a child, repeatedly, that something is wrong with them.
• Physical symptoms. A major review in Archives of Disease in Childhood found bullied children are consistently at higher risk of headaches, stomach aches, sleep problems and colds.
• School avoidance. Feigned illness, skipped lessons, refusing to go in.
• Self-harm and suicidal thoughts. The same review found victims at significantly increased risk of self-harm or thinking about suicide in adolescence. That is the worst end of the range, and it is why this is not "just words".

You do not need to frighten your child into compliance. You do need them to know that the person on the other end is not shrugging it off. They are lying awake.

Secondary consequences: what the harm knocks over#

Secondary consequences are the knock-on effects. The bullying is the first domino. These are the ones that fall afterwards.

• Grades and attendance. A child who cannot concentrate, sleeps badly and avoids school falls behind. StopBullying.gov links bullying to lower grades, lower test scores, and a higher chance of dropping out.
• Friendships and isolation. A target who withdraws loses more friends, which makes them easier to target again.
• Trust. They learn that adults and peers cannot be relied on to protect them. That affects how they approach teachers, doctors, partners and bosses for years.
• Self-concept. "I am weak." "I am unlikeable." "It is my fault." These beliefs outlast the playground.
• Family strain. Their parents are scared, angry and exhausted. Siblings get less attention. The household changes.
• Risky coping. Smoking, alcohol, and other drugs at higher rates.
• Adult mental health. In a prospective study of 1,420 children followed into young adulthood, Copeland and colleagues found that victims had higher rates of generalised anxiety, panic disorder and agoraphobia, even after accounting for earlier psychiatric problems and family hardship. They concluded the effects are "direct, pleiotropic, and long-lasting".
• Relationships and work later in life. The review above also found lingering effects on health, self-worth and quality of life years later, even for people whose bullying stopped at school age.

There is a ripple beyond the target too. Children who witness bullying can feel helpless, guilty and unsafe at school, and are at higher risk of anxiety and depression. Everyone in the room pays something.

How trauma develops#

This is the part I most want a parent to understand, because "they will get over it" is the sentence that does the most damage.

A single unkind comment is not trauma. Trauma develops through a pattern. Roughly:

1. Threat. The child's brain registers danger and switches on the stress response: heart rate up, cortisol released, attention narrowed. That is normal and useful.
2. Repetition. The threat comes back. Tomorrow, next week, in a different form. The system never fully stands down.
3. No escape and no prediction. They cannot leave the class, and they cannot tell when it will happen. Unpredictability is what keeps the body on alert.
4. No buffer. The Harvard Center on the Developing Child describes toxic stress as excessive or prolonged activation of the stress response without supportive relationships to calm it, and says it can disrupt healthy brain development, with effects on learning, attention and health across the lifespan. A caring adult is the thing that turns a bad experience into a survivable one. Bullied children often hide it, so that adult never gets the chance.
5. The body learns. Hypervigilance, startle, stomach in knots on Sunday night, poor sleep. This is conditioning, not weakness.
6. The mind builds a story. Children make meaning out of what happens to them, and the meaning they pick is usually "this is because of me". That belief is what turns an event into an identity.
7. Avoidance. They stop going places, stop speaking up, stop trusting. Life gets smaller, and the smaller life is part of the injury.

This is not a rare outcome reserved for extreme cases. In a 2012 study cited by the NCTSN, 27.6% of boys and 40.5% of girls who had been bullied scored in the clinical range for post-traumatic stress. Not every bullied child is traumatised. But it is common enough that you should assume the risk is real, not hypothetical.

Dose matters. The Archives of Disease in Childhood review found that more frequent, more severe and longer-lasting bullying leads to worse outcomes, and that the effects of frequent bullying go beyond other childhood hardship. In the review's words, the effects of frequent bullying were as detrimental four decades on as being placed in care in childhood. The sooner it stops, the better the odds.

Your child matters too#

Everything above is about the other child. Your own child is not exempt from consequences either, and they may be in trouble themselves.

• They carry risk. StopBullying.gov lists higher rates of substance use, depression or self-harm, school dropout, and aggression among children who bully. In the Copeland study, children who only bullied were at higher risk of antisocial personality disorder in adulthood.
• The worst outcomes belong to children who are both. Children who bully and are also bullied had the highest rates of anxiety, depression and suicidality in that study. Nearly a quarter reported suicidality in young adulthood, compared with under 6% of those not involved in bullying.
• Trauma runs both ways. The NCTSN notes that children exposed to trauma and violence may be more likely to bully others, and that children with more adverse childhood experiences are more likely to show bullying behaviour.

So ask the harder question: what is happening to my child? Are they being bullied elsewhere? Are they copying something they see at home, online, on a team? Are they struggling socially and buying status the cheap way? Is there something going on with their own mental health, or an undiagnosed need that is making this worse?

None of that is an excuse. It is a reason to fix the cause as well as the behaviour. If the only thing you do is punish, the problem tends to go underground.

What to do with the consequences#

Consequences should connect to the behaviour and be about repair, not humiliation.

• Work with the school's process. Follow its sanctions and any restorative steps. Back them, do not argue with them.
• Stop the access that enabled it. If it was online, review devices and accounts together, and take away the platform or the privileges tied to it for a defined period. The NSPCC warns that blanket phone removal rarely solves things on its own, so pair restrictions with open conversations.
• Repair, not a performance. A real apology is specific, about the harm, and asks nothing back. A forced "sorry" with a smirk is worse than none. If the school facilitates it, great. If the other family does not want contact, respect that.
• Practise the alternative. Give them words for the moment they would normally do it. Leaving a group chat. Not joining in. Telling the target they are not okay with what is being said.
• Follow up for weeks, not days. Ask the school how it is going. Check in with your child. The first conversation is the start.

Mental health matters, on both sides#

The other child is going home tonight with the effects of this. Your child is going home tonight with whatever drove it.

If you do nothing else, hold both facts. A parent who can say "what you did was serious, and I am going to help you work out why" is giving their child the best shot at stopping. It is also exactly the kind of adult presence that Harvard's research identifies as the buffer against toxic stress, and the one the child on the receiving end may not have had.

If your child, or the child they hurt, is showing signs of depression, self-harm, or suicidal thoughts, treat it as urgent and get professional help. That is not an overreaction. It is the point.

References#

Background reading, plus support if any of this is live for you.

• StopBullying.gov, Long-term effects of bullying
• Copeland, Wolke, Angold and Costello, Adult psychiatric outcomes of bullying and being bullied by peers in childhood and adolescence (JAMA Psychiatry, 2013)
• Wolke and Lereya, Long-term effects of bullying (Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2015)
• National Child Traumatic Stress Network, Bullying: effects
• Harvard Center on the Developing Child, Toxic stress
• American Psychological Association, Trauma
• NSPCC, How can I help my child if they are being bullied?
• Barnardo's, How to support your child if they're being bullied or cyberbullied
• GOV.UK, Reporting bullying
• Childline, Getting help if you're being bullied (UK, free and confidential for children and young people, call 0800 1111)
• UK: if someone is in immediate danger, call 999. Samaritans are available on 116 123.
• US: call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time.