We knew something was off by the middle of first grade. The teacher kept flagging him for throwing sand at girls and stabbing classmates with a pencil. I sat him down, and he gave me these wild first-grader justifications: she was being mean first. I told him it wasn’t cool, told him to knock it off, and told every teacher after that to keep me in the loop so I could punish him at home.
Second grade, I warned the new teacher before the year even got rolling: I think we’ve got a bully on our hands, keep an eye on him. Same stuff started happening, except now he was zeroing in on specific kids, anyone who couldn’t run fast enough or seemed like an easy target. I kept thinking, I can’t watch him all the time, what am I supposed to do? We disciplined him at home, but nothing really stuck.
Every parent-teacher conference turned into the same conversation about his behavior. Third grade, I walked in, warned the teacher again, same story. The pattern felt endless. Then I picked up a book on the subject, and one passage stopped me cold: if you call a kid a bully, he lives up to the role.
I decided to run an experiment. From that day on, I stopped using the word bully altogether. Instead, I started saying things like, “You’re going to help your teacher today, right? ” and”You’re a good boy, make me proud by being a helper.
” The change was almost overnight. The calls stopped. At the next teacher conference, his teacher couldn’t stop talking about how helpful he’d been. I sat there nodding, but inside I was cautious.
No more bully label, but I still made him do weekly volunteer work, just in case. He still had moments of crazy crap, like attacking kids who were mean to girls, but the bullying itself faded. I don’t know if I caught it in time or if he just needed coaching, but it worked. That experience came back to me recently, harder than I expected.
I’ve been working from home during the lockdown, raising my two youngest sons while my sister and her husband, both doctors, work on the front lines. We’re following strict separation guidelines, so the boys have been with me for months now. My eldest nephew is thirteen, and his younger brother is nine. The two of them get under each other’s skin constantly, but I figured that was normal sibling stuff.
Then one afternoon, I heard the oldest’s voice drop low, and suddenly the youngest let out this awful wail. I froze, listening. Then the oldest, cool as anything, said in this syrupy fake tone, “Hey, are you okay, little buddy? ” while his brother kept crying.
I walked into the little one’s bedroom just in time to see the oldest towering over him, staring down at him with this look I had never seen before. He caught me from the corner of his eye, and his voice shifted into that same fake concerned register. “Mom, something’s wrong with that chair. He was sitting in it,and it just flipped over.
”
I couldn’t believe he thought I’d buy that. His tone was so fake it gave me chills. I had never seen that side of him. I didn’t say much right then, just sent them to separate rooms and went back to work, but my ears stayed sharp the rest of the afternoon.
When I finished for the day, I called him into the study. I asked him how the chair had tipped over. He shrugged. “I don’t know.
It just did. ”
“Show me,” I said. He climbed onto the chair. His brother, still sulking nearby, immediately kicked it out from under him.
Bam. The oldest hit the floor, and before I could react, his brother leaned over him with that same affected sweetness. “Are you okay, bro? ”
The angry scrabbling started immediately, both of them going for each other.
I pried them apart, sent the oldest to his room, made the youngest stay put in his. I kept listening the rest of the day, but nothing else happened. Later, when I called the oldest to the study again, he almost seemed to know I was fishing. He just offered it up.
“I only did that because he was being such a jerk about winning the game. He’s always playing it. Of course he got better than me. Had to take him down a notch, literally.
” He laughed. I took away his cell phone and his brother’s game console too. Then I sat there, thinking about all the people who’ve had to deal with siblings who were legit abusive, and I felt sick. I had one of those myself, a wild crazed sister who liked to dig her talons into my face.
I never scarred physically, thank God, but I know what that kind of household feels like. I hoped I could do better. But I also knew this wasn’t just about one chair. This kid had been bullying his brother for a while, and I’d caught him being mean to other kids online too.
He was generally being a dick, and I’d been reprimanding him every time I saw it, but nothing seemed to break through. He was hurting, that much was clear, but I wasn’t about to let his pain become an excuse for his behavior. I started having regular conversations with him, not lectures, just talks, trying to figure out where all this sour anger was coming from. At first it seemed like he was just born to be an asshole.
But I persisted. I kept showing up, kept asking questions, kept listening even when he gave me nothing. After a while, he started to open up. He told me he felt like he was a disappointment to our family.
Everyone in our family is academic, successful, driven. He wasn’t. He wasn’t doing well in school, he didn’t care about the same things, and he was sure everyone saw him as the failure. Then, quieter, he admitted something else: he was insecure about his sexuality.
His voice was still childlike, nothing like his friends’ voices or his little brother’s, and he thought that made him gay. He wasn’t homophobic, exactly, but he’d swallowed the idea that that was somehow shameful, something to hide, and his reaction was to crank up the macho act, to be overly aggressive and rough. He also thought he was ugly, the dumb older brother who could never do right compared to his younger brother. His body wasn’t developing the way he expected, no facial hair, nothing down below, and he was convinced everyone noticed and pitied him.
I sat there and listened to all of it. Then I apologized. I told him I was sorry I hadn’t made him feel more loved, sorry I hadn’t shown him how important he was to me, to his parents. We had a family Zoom call with his mom and dad, and we talked through everything: his frustrations, his upsets, his fears, every piece of it.
We all agreed to praise him more, to view his achievements with real enthusiasm, to stop comparing him to anyone else, ever again. We told him straight out: we will never compare you to anyone again. It took months, but something shifted. He went from being this annoying, always-in-trouble kid to the kid I always knew was in there somewhere.
He became helpful. Kind. Fun to be around. He stopped picking on his brother, and the two of them started actually getting along, like friends.
We wrote letters of apology to the kids he’d been bullying online. At first he wanted to text them, but I talked him into doing something more serious, more deliberate. He wrote each one out by hand. All the kids were gracious enough to accept his apologies.
Sometimes kids just need to be reminded, loudly and often, how loved and wanted they are. I think about all the other parents out there facing the same thing. It’s easy to assume the parent of a bully is either neglectful or cruel. I’ve seen that assumption play out in my own family.
My sister, the boys’ mother, is a piece of work herself. She and my brother-in-law are separated, mostly because of her. She compulsively lies. She treats everyone like they’re not good enough.
I remember Thanksgiving a few years back, when my then-girlfriend was in a psych facility after threatening to kill herself. I stepped outside to take her call, and my sister came out and slapped me across the face, told me I was being selfish, that I needed to spend time with the family instead of on my phone. Naturally, my nephew picked up on that behavior while she was still trying to act like a mother. It’s a family thing, I guess, for some of us.
I saw another version of this story play out with a friend of mine, not my own kid. Her daughter became a bully in middle school. My mom and her mom had been friends when we were kids, girl scouts and all, but we’d drifted apart as we grew. Then there was this community event about bullying.
I’d been bullied for years myself, so my mom went to support the organizer, hoping to find ways to help me. The friend’s mom showed up too, though she’d left the troop years ago. My mom went over to say hi, asked if her daughter had been bullied too. The woman shook her head.
“No. My daughter’s become a bully. And I’m embarrassed. I want to understand why she’s doing this, and try to teach her how much she’s hurting others.
”
My mom was genuinely impressed. This woman had always been kind but aloof, the type to wave off younger girls picking on each other as just normal kid stuff. But something had finally flicked a switch. She realized her daughter’s behavior had been getting worse for years,and she’d ignored it until it got serious.
I don’t know how it turned out for them, but I heard later from people who went to high school with her that she became less of a true bully, started acting more kindly. I always wondered how those mother-daughter conversations went. My own daughter was another story entirely. I figured it out when I took her phone one day and read her online posts, read her messages.
You ever seen Mean Girls? My kid put all of those characters to shame with her vindictive cattiness. Had she not been my kid, I would have sent her down the road to a highly toxic household. None of my other kids act like that, and I couldn’t figure out where this came from.
We’re not the religious, cellar-dweller type. We’re open about everything, including sex and sexuality. We talk constantly. But when I watched the videos she’d made on her phone, I felt cold.
She would draw dicks on her sister while she slept. She would get girls to fight with their boyfriends. She would intentionally do things to try to break up relationships, to cause drama. She actually paid another underage girl to try to coerce me into having sex with her, and when I didn’t go for it, she physically kicked that girl’s ass.
She recorded herself causing bruises on her own body so she could claim a parent was beating her. She started fights within her own friend groups. She lost every friend she’d had in middle school because of her own antics. I took her phone away.
I cut the internet. I had the police issue trespass notices to all of her friends, to keep them from coming to the house. I removed the door to her room, to prevent any sexual escapades, because honestly I wasn’t a hundred percent sure everything that had been happening was consensual. I reported everything to the proper authorities.
In response, she threatened suicide, and then secretly called the cops herself. We took her to the hospital for the suicide threat, and they placed her in a seventy-two-hour confinement for mental health evaluation. She used the hospital phone to call a friend. That friend, from California, made allegations to the police.
It was a full-on drama meltdown, and I was exhausted. She’s still a bully. Still toxic. There’s not much we can do.
We can’t get her to go to counseling on a committed basis. She’s not willing to change. She might have a mental illness, but I’m not qualified to say. We can only mitigate, try to limit what damage and drama she can do.
We shield the other kids away from her. We try to be as happy as we can as a family. As far as a parental relationship, there isn’t one. We have a regressive drama queen that we’re legally responsible for.
And we just kind of… parent around it. There was another neighbor case, worse in some ways. A little girl next door, about six, kept hitting my younger sister.
We’d go over constantly, tell the mom, hey, your kid hit my sister today. Hey, your kid bit my sister. The mother would just get this look, insisting her precious little angel could never do anything like that. Then one morning at school drop-off, this nine-year-old bully walked up to a random younger kid and sucker punched her right in the face.
About twenty other adults saw it. Instead of disciplining her own child, the mother started screaming at the little victim, calling her a bitch, a slut, a whore, while the kid stood there crying. She actually raised her hand to hit her. A couple of other parents started yelling at her, pushing her away.
Then this grown woman, thirty-five years old, burst into tears, sobbing that people were calling her out on her bullshit. It was a real eye-opener for me. Kids pick up their absolute behavior from somewhere. As it turned out, that mother was a complete psycho.
She regularly lost and gained custody of her kids because of her behavior. She went through boyfriends like they were going out of fashion. She hit one of them around the head with a rolling pin. She was the definition of a Karen.
And once you knew who her parents were, it was clear: it’s a family thing, for sure. Some kids become bullies because something broke inside them. My friend’s son didn’t start until fifth grade. Before that, he was fine, super close to his grandpa, his mom’s dad.
When the grandpa died, it destroyed him. His whole behavior changed within a few weeks of the funeral. His mom called my wife, saying things he’d started saying and doing. Not at school, that was the strange part.
We’d had a parent-teacher conferencedays before, and the teacher didn’t say a word. We talked to him. Your first reaction is to protect your kid, not to accept it, but we could tell by the way he was reacting, by the way his voice wobbled, that something real was going on. We arranged for him to see a therapist.
We monitor his behavior now. He’s a good kid who makes terrible decisions. As a father of four, I’ve been on both ends of this thing. Usually, if there’s a bully, there’s something going on at home.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree at times. But not always. There’s the little girl we take care of sometimes. She’s eight now, family friend, basically.
We’re close, even though she has her own family. She started bullying when she started school, because she thinks she’s dominant. The underlying reasons are rooted in her household, her environment, how the adults treat her, how people react to her actions, how she’s reprimanded, how often she’s disciplined, who she’s surrounded by. She’s not intentionally bad.
Her jokes come off as sarcasm at such a young age, to the point of insult sometimes. It still isn’t easy to fix. The best method I’ve found is to stay calm and explain: cause, effect, consequences, what the victim feels. Remember, you’re dealing with a kid.
Don’t just scold them and expect them to see at your level of maturity. Explain. Talk it out. Their stubbornness will get in the way, but stay firm.
Ease your way into their trust. Learn child psychology. Her teachers and classmates see what’s happening, but her household doesn’t treat it as an issue. They actually celebrate her cleverness.
Even when they do discipline her, their methods aren’t working. My oldest nephew taught me that a kid can change if someone actually listens. I think about him now, how far he’s come in just a few months. Not perfect, but trying.
He apologized to the kids he hurt. He started helping around the house without being asked. He and his brother laugh together now. I don’t know if I caught it in time, or if he just needed coaching, or if he needed to feel loved.
Probably all of it. Maybe most of it was the last one. Sometimes kids need to be reminded, loudly and often, how loved they are.
And sometimes that’s the only thing that actually changes anything.