Parenting
You don't know whether to step in or teach them to handle it and most of the standard advice has trade-offs you can see.
You found out. They told you, or you noticed the change. They don’t want to go to school. They’ve stopped wanting to do the activity where the bully is. They’ve started having stomach aches in the morning. Their grades dropped. Their old friends seem to be avoiding them now too. You want to fix it. You also know that if you call the school or the other kid’s parents, the bullying might get worse. If you tell your child to stand up for themselves, you don’t know what that means for a kid who couldn’t until now. If you take them out of the situation entirely, you teach them that escape is the only solution.
None of the standard responses are obviously right. The bullying has put both your child and you in an impossible position.
The bullying is still happening, or you don’t know whether it is, or it stopped and started again with someone else.
You very likely came up either as a kid who was bullied or as a kid who was nearby when someone else was, and your nervous system has been activated by what’s happening to your child in a way that’s bigger than this specific situation. You may have grown up in a household where you weren’t protected when it mattered, and you’ve sworn you’d protect your child differently. You may have absorbed from current culture that bullying is a moral problem with a clear villain, and the framing has made it harder to look at the response side, where you actually have room to act. You may have been the kid who handled bullying by becoming invisible, and the strategy has shaped what you can imagine for your child.
The advice falls into two categories. One says intervene heavily. The other says teach the child resilience. Both treat the bullying as the problem to solve. The bullying is one half. How your child responds is the other half. The bully’s behavior is sustained by the response they’re getting, including from your child.
Children who get bullied often have a recognizable response pattern that the bully can read. Changing the response, with the child as the agent, can change what the bully gets out of the interaction. The intervention is in the response, not in the bully.
For your child’s anxiety more broadly, see My child has anxiety . For their school refusal if that’s developed, see My child refuses to go to school .
The bullying is being maintained by what the bully is getting. The intervention works at that level.
Strategic therapy treats the bully as a system that runs on a particular reaction from your child. We coach you on the parental side (when to escalate with the school, when to hold back) and we help your child change the specific reaction the bully has been reading. The reward dries up, and the targeting moves on or stops.
The bully stops getting what made the targeting worth it.
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