Bullying: how to recognise it and what to do

“It’s nothing. They’re just messing about.”

That was what a thirteen-year-old said when his mum asked him in the car why, for the third week running, he was ill on a Monday morning. A headache, a stomach ache, sometimes both. At home he was fine, on Friday afternoons he was almost cheerful, and on Sunday evenings he went quiet and irritable. His mum put it down to puberty. Only when she happened to see a message on his phone — a photo from the changing room with a caption I won’t repeat — did she understand that the “messing about” was not messing about.

Bullying is talked about a great deal, yet parents rarely recognise it in time. Not because they don’t care, but because children keep quiet about it and because the signs look like everything else that comes with growing up. This piece is written mainly for parents: how to recognise bullying, how to respond when your child tells you, and what to do so that it doesn’t happen again.

What is bullying and what is a falling-out

The most widely used definition comes from the work of the Norwegian researcher Dan Olweus. Bullying has three features: it is intentional, it is repeated, and there is an imbalance of power between those involved. Power can be physical, but it can also be social — who has more friends, who is more popular, who has the video on their phone.

The distinction matters, because not every conflict is bullying. Two equally strong friends who fall out over a game and sit together again the next day are not in a bullying relationship. A child whom a group of classmates has been shutting out of conversations for months, mocking his voice and hiding his things, is — even if nobody has hit anybody.

Bullying has several faces:

• Physical — pushing, hitting, damaging belongings.
• Verbal — name-calling, mockery, threats, hurtful nicknames.
• Relational — exclusion, spreading rumours, turning others against someone. It is often the hardest to notice and often hurts the most.
• Online — hurtful messages, posts, group chats a child is added to or removed from “by mistake”, sharing photos without consent.

You can also find a description of the concept and links to further sources in the knowledge base under bullying.

How common it is

Bullying is not a rarity that only happens to “special” children. In 2019 UNESCO summarised data from 144 countries and territories: almost one in three pupils reported having been bullied by peers at school at least once in the previous month. The figures vary between countries, but the pattern is similar everywhere — bullying is more common in the last years of primary school and at the start of secondary school, when a young person’s place in the group is at its most uncertain and matters most.

Research also shows that bullying is not an innocent rite of passage that “toughens a child up”. A meta-analysis by Gianluca Gini and Tiziana Pozzoli found that children who are bullied more often have psychosomatic problems — headaches, stomach aches, sleep difficulties. A longitudinal study by William Copeland and colleagues, which followed children into adulthood, found that those who had been bullied as children more often had anxiety disorders and depression as adults — even after other family difficulties were taken into account.

Why children don’t tell

Parents are often baffled: “Why didn’t he tell me? He knows I’d help him.” But a child’s logic is different. The reasons children most often give are:

• Shame. Being the target means being the one with “something wrong” with him. A child often believes he somehow deserved it. You can read more about how shame works in the knowledge base under shame.
• Fear that it will get worse. If a parent rings the school and the teacher handles it clumsily, the bullying can intensify — and the child knows this.
• Fear of the parents’ reaction. That mum will cry, that dad will go to school and shout, that they’ll take his phone away because it happened online.
• Loyalty to the group. Being a “grass” in a teenage group is almost as bad as being the target.
• Not knowing it isn’t normal. If it has been going on long enough, it becomes part of the background.

Because children often don’t tell, the signs you can notice yourself matter: sudden physical complaints on school days, lost or damaged belongings, avoiding a particular route or bus, withdrawing from friends he used to spend time with, mood swings after using his phone, falling grades, sleeplessness. None of these signs proves bullying on its own. Together, and when the change is sudden, they are a reason to ask.

Bullying is a group phenomenon

When we think of bullying, we usually picture two people: a bully and a victim. In the 1990s the Finnish researcher Christina Salmivalli showed that the picture is different. Almost the whole class takes part in bullying, just in different roles. Some help the bully, others laugh and so encourage him, and most stand by and do nothing. Only a few children step in to defend the target.

This has two consequences that matter for parents. First: bullying is not sustained by one “bad” child alone, but because the group allows it or rewards it with attention. That is why punishing one child is rarely enough. Second: your own child has probably already been in one of these roles — perhaps not as the target, but as the one who watched. Observational research in school playgrounds has found that bullying often stops quickly when one of the peers intervenes. Bystanders, in other words, have more power than they think.

When your child speaks up: the first conversation

The first conversation is often decisive. If your child feels understood, he will come back. If he feels guilty or ashamed, or if the parent reacts so strongly that the child then has to comfort them, next time he will stay silent.

A few things that help:

• Listen first, act later. Don’t interrupt with “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” or “And what did you do?”. Even if both questions are on the tip of your tongue.
• Tell him it isn’t his fault. Clearly, and more than once. “Nobody deserves to be treated like that.”
• Thank him for telling you. It was hard for him.
• Manage your own reaction. Your anger is understandable, but your child needs a calm adult, not another storm. If you need time, take it: “Thank you for trusting me. I’m going to think for a bit about how I can help, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”
• Don’t promise what you can’t keep. “I won’t tell anyone” is a promise you can almost never keep when it comes to bullying. Better: “I won’t do anything without talking to you first.”

The conversation might go something like this (a composite, not a real person):

“You can’t go to the school. It’ll only make it worse.”
“I can hear you’re scared it would get worse. That’s a sensible fear. I won’t do anything without you.”
“So what will you do?”
“First I’d like to understand what’s going on. Then we’ll choose together who at school you’d trust most.”
“Maybe my form teacher. She doesn’t shout.”

Something important happened in this short exchange: the child got back a small piece of control. Bullying is an experience of helplessness. Help that repeats that helplessness — when adults do something over the child’s head that he doesn’t understand — can hurt him all over again.

What to do at school

The school is responsible for children’s safety on its premises and must deal with bullying. In Slovenia every primary school has an education plan (vzgojni načrt) and school rules setting out how it responds to violations. A few steps that tend to prove useful in practice:

1. Keep a record. Dates, what happened, who was there, screenshots of messages and posts. No accusations, just facts.
2. Start with the form teacher or the school counselling service. Ask for a meeting, not an immediate showdown in the corridor. Say what you know and ask what they have noticed.
3. Agree on a concrete plan. Who will do what, when you will speak again, how your child will be better protected during breaks.
4. Don’t contact the other child’s parents yourself, at least not at first. Because emotions run high on both sides, such conversations often turn into an argument, and your child pays the price at school.
5. If nothing changes, go to the head teacher. Threats, physical injuries, extortion or the sharing of intimate images are a matter for the police (113 in Slovenia).

With online bullying there is a particular rule: don’t take your child’s phone away as “protection”. Children often say nothing precisely because they are afraid of losing their phone. Instead, block, report and save the evidence together. Researchers who have reviewed the studies on cyberbullying point out that online and “traditional” bullying often overlap — a child who is called names in a group chat often experiences it in the corridor too.

What happens at home

A child who is being bullied needs a home where he can relax. That doesn’t mean you have to talk about what happened all the time. Often the opposite helps: time when everything is as it was, when you play, cook or watch a series together, and nobody asks him anything.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, home is understood as a secure base — a place from which a child can set out into the world and to which he returns when things are hard. Bullying at school puts that base to the test. A child will use it if he feels his parents are steady enough that his distress won’t knock them over.

It also helps if you help your child build relationships outside the classroom: a club, sport, relatives, friends from the neighbourhood. A child who has at least one friend is better protected from bullying and recovers from it faster. It doesn’t have to be many friends. One is enough — one in front of whom he doesn’t have to be someone else.

Long-lasting bullying often shakes a child’s picture of himself. I wrote about how parents can support it in Self-image in the teenage years: what parents can do. And if your teenager suddenly goes quiet at home, you may find When a teenager goes quiet: how family therapy opens the conversation helpful.

What if your child is the one who bullies

This is a sentence no parent wants to hear. The first response is almost always defence: “My child wouldn’t do that.” Or the opposite — shame and anger that merge into punishment.

Neither response helps. Children who bully their peers are not “bad children”. Often they have experienced humiliation themselves, at home or elsewhere. Sometimes they are looking for a place in the group that they don’t know how to get any other way. Sometimes they don’t understand how much something they see as a joke actually hurts.

What helps is clarity without humiliation: the bullying has to stop, he will face the consequences, and you won’t stop loving him. And curiosity: what is going on inside him that he needs someone beneath him? The study by Copeland and colleagues found that those who had bullied others as children also had difficulties in adulthood — and most markedly those who had been both, bullies and victims at once. Both children, in other words, need help.

Exercise: an evening conversation without interrogation

If you suspect something is going on at school but your child isn’t talking, try this on a few evenings in a row this week.

1. Choose a time when you are beside him, not facing him. In the car, while cooking, walking the dog. Side-by-side conversations are easier for teenagers than face-to-face ones.
2. Instead of “How was school?”, ask something specific. “Who did you sit with at lunch today?” “Which part of the day was the most annoying?”
3. Say something about yourself. Briefly and honestly, for example: “When I was in Year 7, they laughed at me because of my glasses. I never told anyone.”
4. If he mentions something, don’t pounce. Repeat what you heard: “So Luka’s been picking on you again lately.” And wait.
5. End with an offer, not a demand. “If you ever want to tell me more, I’m here. Even if it’s eleven at night.”

He may not say anything on the first evening. The point is for him to learn that talking to you is safe. When he’s ready, he’ll know where to go.

When you need more help

Some children need more after bullying than their parents and school can give. Watch for signs that last longer than a few weeks: persistent low mood, withdrawal from everything that used to bring joy, missing school, sleeplessness, panic attacks. I wrote about how to tell ordinary ups and downs from depression in Teenage depression: telling it apart from ordinary mood swings.

The first places to turn are your child’s GP or paediatrician, the school counselling service, and a therapist who specialises in working with children and adolescents. In Slovenia young people can call the TOM helpline anonymously on 116 111.

If your child talks about not wanting to live, is self-harming, or you think they are in immediate danger, don’t wait. Call 112 or take them to A&E. In Slovenia help is also available from the mental health crisis line 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) and the Samaritans helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day). You can read more about what self-harm means and how to respond in Self-harm: what it really means and how to respond.

Bullying shakes the whole family too. Parents find themselves caught between anger, guilt and helplessness, they disagree about what to do, siblings withdraw. At such times family therapy can be a place where you can all stop together and find a way forward that leaves nobody on the sidelines. I also work with English-speaking families.

Where the limits are

I’d like to be honest here about a few things this piece can’t solve.

Not every hurt is bullying. Teenage friendships break up, groups reshape themselves, someone doesn’t invite someone to a birthday party. It hurts and your child needs comfort, but it isn’t necessarily bullying. If we call every rejection bullying, we take away a child’s chance to learn to bear disappointment — and adults’ ability to recognise when something more serious is going on.

Parents can’t do it all alone. Bullying is a group phenomenon and needs a response at group level: the class, the school, sometimes the community. When a school doesn’t act, that is a systemic problem, not your personal failure.

Sometimes the answer is a change of setting. If the bullying continues despite every effort, changing class or school can be a reasonable solution, not a defeat. A child is not obliged to stay where he is being humiliated just to prove he is strong.

This piece is no substitute for professional judgement. It can’t assess your child or your situation. It can help you recognise when it’s time for the next step.

What to remember

• Bullying is intentional, repeated and based on an imbalance of power. A falling-out between equals is not bullying.
• Children often stay silent about bullying out of shame and fear. Watch for changes: physical complaints on school days, withdrawal, lost belongings.
• When your child speaks up, listen first, tell him it isn’t his fault, and don’t act without him.
• Bullying is a group phenomenon. Change is easiest with the bystanders and with the school as a whole.
• With threats, injuries or suicidal thoughts, don’t wait: 112, and for young people in Slovenia the TOM helpline 116 111.