My friend’s child had just finished primary school when she had the exchange with another parent. They had been a nice class, my friend commented casually to the other mother. The mother was taken aback and said her child had been bullied. “What was strange, though, was that she said my child had been bullied too, and that she had witnessed it a few times. My child still insists that isn’t the case,” my friend informed me.
y friend felt it had been sarky comments that the other child had taken personally. Her own child just saw it as banter and wasn’t bothered. But to the other mother, it was bullying. So how do we decipher between bullying and instances of unfriendly behaviour?
“Bullying isn’t subjective, but what is happening is a conflating of kids not always being very kind or pleasant, with bullying,” psychotherapist Joanna Fortune says firmly; we’re talking about younger, pre-teen children.
“Bullying is never on the fence. It’s very serious, it should always be acted upon, in the first instance by adults; parents to other parents, parents to teachers.” She defines bullying as repeated behaviour that is conscious and targeted. “By one child against another, or one child inciting a group to exclude another.”
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Psychotherapist Joanna Fortune. Photo: Firechild Photography
What is not bullying, Fortune continues emphatically, is “a bit of bickering on the playground”. “Parents may say, ‘if you don’t play with that child, that’s bullying’. Or ‘your child didn’t let my child play; that’s bullying’. It’s not. It’s rude, it might be mean, it’s not pleasant, but it’s not bullying.”
It is what Fortune calls microaggressions. “By definition, they’re little moments of aggression between kids in relation to each other. It tends to happen in the context of play, or if they’re working on a project together in class. For example, one child spills the paint over the project and the other one goes: ‘hey, that’s it, you’ve ruined it, you go away’.”
That is not bullying, Joanna says. That is a child acting out of frustration. Where bullying is a sustained act, of which the perpetrator is aware, microaggressions are more temporal.
“It’s more, perhaps you’re my friend one day, but the next day you’re not, but the day after I’ll have forgotten that I was annoyed with you about that, and we’ll be back friends again. It’s a much more transient feeling. Bullying isn’t. Bullying hangs around, it’s repeated, it’s conscious and it’s really serious.”
Very young children rarely bully, Fortune adds. “They’re still working out the parameters of relationship and friendship. It can take us by surprise, and I think this is what’s quite stressful for a lot of parents. We don’t like to think that our young children are capable of aggression. But they are. If you’ve ever seen them swipe a toy from somebody else, or push somebody over, or elbow their way in; they’re absolutely capable of it.”
‘What’s quite stressful for a lot of parents is we don’t like to think that our young children are capable of aggression’
She traces the development of friendship from the earliest years. “With preschoolers, for example, if you’re a child and I’m a child, we’re friends. That is as complicated as it gets. I want to play, you’re available to play with, and for 20 beautiful minutes on this playground, we will be best pals. And I will never think of you again, but it was beautiful,” she smiles.
This kind of transient approach to friendship will continue into the early years of primary school. “Even in junior infants, a lot of parents will notice that their kids pick up and drop friends quite a lot, quite casually. That’s quite normal. That’s not a sign of, ‘oh my child is being left out all the time’. It’s how children play at that age.”
Between seven and nine, they tend to begin to settle into friendship clusters, girls typically do this earlier than boys. At this point, more overt aggression can appear. “It’s who’s in, who’s out. Beforehand, it’s not that it never happens, but rarely is it a conscious thing.”
But how do you really diagnose if what your child is experiencing is bullying or just microaggressions? “What we want to do is hold a position of inquisitiveness with our children,” Fortune advises. “Is what I’m hearing an isolated incident of tired or frustrated, overwhelmed, overstimulated children having enough of each other? That’s a microaggression. Or is this something that feels a little bit more insidious, a little bit more targeted? There’s more conscious effort in it, and it’s the same child or children day in day out; I’m hearing a pattern. That’s different.”
Why do we act out in microaggressions? It tends to be about frustration, confusion, overwhelm, over-stimulation, Fortune explains. Or because a child is very involved in play and the other child changes how things are going, and they react out of disappointment. “So it tends to come out of feelings,” she says.
It’s important to remember that an individual child’s temperament is relevant here. Some are what Fortune calls “Teflon-coated kids”, for whom things will naturally not have as much of an impact. “Some of us have more emotionally sensitive kids, who feel the world at a deeper level. And what is a microaggression (a casual occurrence) for one child in the playground, can unsettle another child. It doesn’t change the intent of the behaviour. What has changed is how it landed.”
Fortune dismisses the idea that children are all born kind. “Children learn and develop the capacity for kindness; it’s nurtured within relationships. If we want to raise kind children, we have them do and see and hear kind things.”
While they are developing the skills of compassion and empathy, there will be flare-ups of microaggressions. “I don’t want to make it sound like I’m saying it doesn’t matter; I’m not dismissing these microaggressions, ‘oh sure look it, that’s just kids’. I would still encourage kids to make repair. Say to them, let’s press the rewind button; what do we need to do differently.”
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Sometimes younger children just want to vent their frustrations and for parents to feel how they are feeling. Picture posed: Getty
It is an opportunity to teach them empathy. Talk to them about how the other child might have felt. “So we plant those seeds; it’s not like we ignore, minimise or dismiss microaggressions, but we don’t psychopathologise them either.”
The trickiest part of all this can be the reactions of other parents, the what to one parent is normal, to another is bullying factor. “We need to be aware of where does our understanding of bullying come from,” Fortune explains of the fact that sometimes, parents might overreact. “And if it comes from our own unresolved experiences, that’s really hard, because maybe we’re carrying a hurt that we’ve never gotten to heal, we’ve never gotten to process. Maybe we needed our grown-up to step in and act for us at a time when they didn’t. We’re carrying that as an overcompensation now; ‘I never want my child remotely disappointed in school. Because I never want them to feel the way I did’.”
This is not doing your child any favours. “That is so understandable, and well motivated, but actually we’re short-circuiting our children’s emotional and psychosocial development. They have to be able to fall out with each other, so that they can repair and get back together. They have to work out that relationships matter more than rows.”
‘We don’t jump in with that fix-and-change agenda. We don’t rescue, but we want to sit with them in the feeling’
Unless it is bullying, Fortune advises parents stand back as much as possible, and see if the children can figure it out amongst themselves. “Leave it, certainly a couple of days, a week, see how it goes. Because (if you get involved unnecessarily), you’re now avoiding eyes with a group of mothers at the gate; those kids have moved on and they’re friends again.
“We don’t sabotage our children’s emotional experience with a fix or change agenda: ‘Here I come, I’m going to save the day, I’m going to jump in and fix that for you’, when all your child wanted you to do was listen. Sometimes our kids just want us to bear witness to the difficult feeling, so that they can find their way through it. And finding their way through it is so important in terms of developing a capacity for self-regulation and emotional resilience. Being out of sync, but that process of getting back into sync.”
Ideally, you do not want your child sitting in school thinking they need to wait until two o’clock, when their parent will come and fix things. “They need to be able to do those repairs, to be able to master those tension-rousing experiences themselves,” Fortune says.
As parents, it is helpful to try to be honest with ourselves. “We have worries, we have fears. It’s hard to let that go. I think we need to go, ‘whose lens am I assessing the situation through? The lens of the children, or my own?’ Because there’s no better way to discover our own childhood issues than to become a parent.
“We don’t jump in with that fix-and-change agenda. We don’t rescue, but we want to sit with them in the feeling,” Fortune explains. And if you can, try to get them to consider how it felt to be the other person.
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