For Parents! How To Talk To The School When Your Child Is Bullied

The meeting most parents dread, and the one thing that usually has to happen before bullying stops. What to record, how to open the conversation, what to ask for, and why you should refuse a joint sit-down.

Key Takeaways

• Do not assume the school has a written process, a person who owns the report, or an automatic follow-up step.
• Keep a written record from the first sign, including who, what, when and where, and bring a copy to the meeting.
• Explain it in a friendly, non-confrontational way and ask the teacher what they have observed themselves.
• Refuse mediation with both children present, because bullying is defined by an imbalance of power and a joint meeting usually makes it worse.
• The school should act immediately and tell you the plan; about a week is the outside edge of reasonable.

Part one covered what to do at home. This one focuses on the experience you will have when you speak to school officials. This is a stressful position to be in but as we’ll see, critical.

Parents are often reluctant to talk to the teacher or principal because they feel like maybe that’s not their place. Perhaps they’re even worried that if they do talk to the school official, they’ll make the situation worse, because the official will inadvertently make their kid stand out, and then it will make them a target for further bullying. These are legitimate concerns. Your child might have even told you, “I talked to my teacher, and they said something to the class. Then I really got it from the other kids!”

The problem is that if you don’t do something, it will often get worse, so it may not stop unless you take action.

The first three key points are: One, understand it may not stop unless you talk to the school officials. Two, keep your emotions in check. We want to give factual information, and that’s why we talked in the prior chapter about make sure you thoroughly listen, provide empathy for your child, and make sure that they’re comfortable sharing all the information. Three, and most importantly, kids should never have to tolerate bullying at school (or anywhere). Yes, we’ll relate how it does happen, however that doesn’t mean it’s ok to happen.

Sometimes the information about bullying is very emotional, and it will likely be hard for your kid to talk about. It’d be hard for them to say what the other child said to them. Maybe it’s a bad word that they don’t normally say to you as the parent, and if they say that word out loud, they will typically get in trouble at home. Let them know that it’s okay for them to say what happened, and it’s okay for them to say anything to you as a parent in this situation.

When you’re talking to your child ahead of time, make sure that you’re fully informed. This is another reason it’s important to be fully engaged in what happens, be empathetic, and find out the whole story. Then, when you talk to the school official, you can give factual information (preferably written) about your child’s experience and make sure that you tell them the who, what, when, where, and how.

The who would include all the kids that are involved, not just the kid who’s bullying your child. There are often more kids involved. Make sure that you have a conversation but do it in the right way. (part one covers this)

Let the school know who’s been helping, who are the helpers and supporters of your child, and who’s been positive, and all the other parties, including the teachers that might have been helpful. The teachers that might have said something and you need to be very specific about it–what actually happened. Try to be as accurate as possible. When did it happen and where, this is very important.

Again, bullying happens in all kinds of different spaces. It’s very important to know, because maybe there’s a hole in where the teachers are monitoring class, and the how (what the bullying was).

Another consideration is that you work with the staff. This doesn’t mean do their jobs for them, but you want to help them find a solution to stop the bullying for the sake of the child and be supportive of the staff. Keep in mind that the kids who bully are not doing it because they have low self-esteem, whatever you may have heard, and while there needs to be negative consequences for bullying, in the long term, it’s not good for any of the kids.

While of course your primary focus is on your child, if you are also focused on the fact that it’s not good for the kid who is doing the bullying as well, it will be easier for the school staff to listen to you. It’s not good for your child, and it’s not good for the sake of the classroom environment and the school. It’s not positive for anybody involved.

I can’t stress this enough. If you communicate with all that in mind, it’s going to come across a lot better than if you are just saying, "I don’t care about anybody except for my kid, and you guys need to fix it now!" with a bunch of swear words added to it.

The next consideration is do not under any circumstances contact the parent of the student who’s bullying. This often is a parent’s first response. If you call up Johnny’s mom and say, "Hey, your kid’s been bothering my kid," it often makes matters worse. School officials have that role, and they need to do their job. When a third party handles it in a less emotional way, the outcome will be better for you. And… what if you find out the information from your child is wrong?

Your expectation should be that the bullying stops. Let me reiterate. Your expectation is 100% that this stops. You should not accept that it reduces or only happens once in a while. It ENDS. It may not be overnight, but you should be talking regularly with your child and with the school staff to ensure the bully has stopped. If it persists, then you should contact the school authorities again.

In summary, for your conversation – when you talk to the school officials, don’t hold back with information and questions. Keep the emotions in-check, understand that this is not good for anybody (even the child who was bullying), and it doesn’t help their school environment. Understand also that they may not be aware of the problem. You might feel like, "You ought to be aware of the problem.

You guys are the ones watching these kids. You should be checking the kids in the classroom. How could you guys possibly let this happen?" That will escalate into a conflict, therefore not helping your child. What’s going to help your child is you coming in with the factual information, "My child’s been bullied at school by this child. This is where it’s happened. These are the other kids involved.

This is when it’s happened, and this is what’s been going on. Now, I want to work with you to resolve the situation and make sure this doesn’t continue." That’s a very common, reasonable explanation. Helpful hint: you will know you’re off track the moment you use the phrase “YOU SHOULD.”

Don’t assume the school has done this before

Here’s something that will save you a lot of frustration later. Do not walk in assuming the school has a system for this, or that they’ll handle it the way you would.

Nearly every teacher and administrator I’ve dealt with cares about these kids and genuinely wants the situation handled. That part is real, and you should go in believing it. What’s frequently missing is the machinery. Plenty of good schools have no written process for a bullying report, nobody who owns it once it’s reported, and no step that automatically follows the first conversation. That isn’t indifference. It’s that nobody ever built it.

Ask, early and pleasantly. What is your process when a parent reports bullying? Who handles it from here? What happens next, and when?

If the answers are vague, that’s useful information and it is NOT a reason to get adversarial (you’ll lose the room and your child pays for it). It means some of the structure is going to have to come from you, which is exactly what the written record and the scheduled follow-up below are for.

And if it turns out they do have a real program in place, you’ll know inside about thirty seconds, and everything after this gets easier.

Written Record

Keep a written record. If your child has told you, or you think that your kid is being bullied, as you’re gathering information, keep a written record. In some instances, your child will come straight out and tell you that they’ve been bullied, here’s what’s happened, and they’ll give you a really good picture of everything. In some cases, you may just notice a mood shift in your kid.

There may be something unusual at home, and you may not have a clear indication that something’s wrong. It may take you a while before you even make a note of this. Then it gets progressively worse over time. You get some information, and then you get a little more information, and finally you find out hey, my daughter has been bullied for the last six months.

This may be very unsettling when you find this out, but it’s important to pay close attention to that and then you can write some notes when you first started noticing it when it happened.

If the dates aren’t exact, that’s okay. The better you can do it, the more helpful it’ll be. You want to record the names of the kids involved. All of the kids, not just the kid who’s doing the bullying. There’re often other kids involved, kids that might be egging them on, kids that might not be the original one who’s bullying, but they may be participating later.

There also might be kids that are helping your child. Is there anybody helping? Is there anybody your child after the bullying is over? Are they helping and trying to intervene? Those are important ones to write down too, and make sure you make note of them. You want to know when, what, where, and how.

The Meeting

Meet with the teacher and/or the principal and explain everything in a friendly non-confrontational way. Since you get this information, you can explain to them, "My daughter reported this to me. She said this is what happened, and I know this is not good for anybody in the environment of your school, including the kid who’s doing the bullying." There are a lot of negative consequences for the kids who are bullying as well, so you want to make sure this gets fixed.

Ask the teacher about their observations. They may have observed something. They may have seen some of this stuff. They may have chalked it up to a conflict. They may have not noticed it. They may have thought that your kid was involved as well and was responding back and forth. That’s an important time not to get defensive. Maybe your kid was involved with responding.

Maybe they were responding to getting bullied, or maybe they were also initiating some of it. Let’s wait until we get all the information until we make a decision. We want to know if they’ve suspected bullying or anything else.

Next, ask how your kid has gotten along with others in class. Have they made friends? Have they been interacting well with other kids? Does it seem like there’s a good social environment around them? Have you noticed that they’ve been isolated or excluded from the playground events or activities with other students? This is important because we want to establish whether or not your child’s social environment is good or not.

The teacher may or may not have a great understanding of that because they’ve got a lot of other kids to watch, but you can establish some good baseline information on whether your kid is making friends and playing on the playground? Are they participating in activities? Or are they being excluded from activities? It also will help you get the teacher to pay attention to these things and note them moving forward.

Actions

Ask the teacher what they intend to do about the bullying. Will they be investigating and stopping the bullying? If you’re concerned about how your child is coping with the stress, if it seems even slightly severe, ask to talk to the school counselor. This is nice to do for a couple reasons. One of the reasons is that the school counselor can work in conjunction with the teacher to support stopping the bullying in the classroom. Hopefully we’re intercepting this when it’s more minor. I would much rather you talk to the school when it’s not very severe.

Set a Follow Up

Set up a follow-up. Do that the day you meet with the teacher. Don’t just say, "Well, I’ll call you." Set that up at that time, maybe for 30 days later or whatever time period you feel comfortable with. What happens if your kid gets bullied even more severely as a result of this? Maybe for some reason the strategy didn’t work, and it made the situation worse.

Now, your child might not want to report it to you because the evidence is when he or she reports it, the bullying gets worse. In his or her mind they’re thinking, “I don’t want to tell you that it’s worse because you’re going to tell my teacher, then it’s going to make it even worse.” Have the follow-up set so that regardless of what you hear at home, you can then talk to the teacher.

If it’s better, then the follow-up reinforces the correct behavior that the teacher is doing and everything that’s working well. If it’s not better, then you can make a new plan.

Expectations

If there’s no improvement, you need to speak to the school principal. As a reminder, keep notes. This is not because you’re being a lawyer here, but it’s so you can make sure you’re clear-headed, and you can speak professionally with everybody, so there’s less emotion involved. It’s very easy for this to escalate into emotion, but then you don’t get the outcome that you want.

Your expectation should be that the school staff investigates immediately. If they say, "Well, we’re going to get on that next week,” as for specific actions and deadlines. Bullying isn’t something they get to wait on. They need to do it immediately, and they should inform you of their plan as soon as they do something about it. As I said before, they should let you know what their plan is.

There shouldn’t be any delay in this. They should let you know very quickly what the deal is. They should be talking to the parents of the child who is doing the bullying. They should be talking to that child and all the other children involved, including the ones who were helping your child, including the ones who were supporting the child who was bullying and any of the involved parents.

Notes on Solutions

It’s a bad idea for the school staff to have a joint meeting between your child and the child who bullied them. Remember this isn’t conflict resolution, this is bullying. If the kid who is bullying your child is in a meeting with them, they’re already at a higher power level. There’s an imbalance of power. Bullying is a form of victimization, not conflict. While you may not be able to talk them out of it – be aware of this.

To expand on this – remember, it’s okay to have people “talk it out” if it was a peer-to-peer conflict. It could be an argument or even a fight! However, with bullying, you can’t use these tactics. It’s more like abuse or victimization. The school staff should never have mediation or conversation. It will be embarrassing for your child, and it is very likely to make the bullying worse.

If their plan is to have your kids sit down together and have them talk it out, you might try to suggest other alternatives if you can. It’s fine if you explain bullying, and you can share some of this information with them about how bullying is an imbalance of power. That’s not going to resolve the situation. That will embarrass your child and that’s not going to make anything better.

What we want to know is what are they going to do so that the kid who’s bullying does not do this anymore. That has to do with that child. What are we going to do to support my child who’s being bullied? That’s the solution we’re looking for, not how they’re going to mediate. Mediation will not work unless we’ve got this story completely wrong and there’s no imbalance of power and it’s a conflict situation.

What they should be doing with bullying is meeting with the child who is bullying, and they should be meeting with the bullied child to learn what they’ve experienced and make sure there’s a plan to keep them safe. The school should be talking to them about keeping them safe, how they’re going to be supported and feel better if there’s any stress or trauma, then to deal with that.

Rules and policies need to be enforced. What are the school’s rules and policies? Are they on the website? The school needs to meet with the kid who’s suspected of the bullying to make sure they know the rules. Make sure there are consequences and make sure in both cases (all kids and parents involved), the parents know the plan that they know what the plan is and what is tolerated and what is going to be acceptable.

What’s important here, as well, is there’s no blame for the bullied child. Very frequently what happens is they say, "Well, if you didn’t talk that way, or if you didn’t wear those clothes, or if you didn’t do this or do that, the other kid wouldn’t have bullied you." If we’ve established that this is a bullying situation, there’s no blame involved.

In some cases, you may find the school has insufficient rules or policies. You may not be able to change these. You can still establish and understand the actions that will happen for this situation.

You can still help your child. There may be a lack of social skills or lower self-esteem. Maybe they did wear something that really made them stand out. It doesn’t mean we couldn’t make some modifications or help them improve social skills or have them talk to the school counselor about how they operate with other kids. But that’s not blaming them. That’s just other work that we’re going to do to help them develop. Long term development in a positive way is a very different thing from blaming them for the situation.

Be patient with the school. Give the school reasonable time to investigate and hear both sides of the story. Just because your kid said were being bullied doesn’t mean that’s what happened. We need to make sure that everything is understood. Of course, there are cases where a kid says they are being bullied, and they’re the one doing the bullying. The child said says they are being bullied because they know that school is really harsh on kids who are bullying.

and they wanted to get the other kid in big trouble… Educators need to make sure that they’re not hasty about making any of these conclusions or jumping to an assessment without understanding the whole situation. The whole process usually wouldn’t take longer than about a week. More than a week, it’s ok to ask about and it’s very important, as with all of this, to do in writing.

Most administrators and staff are very responsive to bullying concerns. We know that they very much want to handle these situations. It doesn’t mean some of them don’t get through and kids get bullied. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have 19% of kids bullying other kids and 14% of kids getting bullied. Just be persistent, make sure that you keep good notes and follow these rules, and you’ll get good results most of the time. Sometimes you don’t get good results, and then you must make some other decisions.

Written records, again, are very important–yours and ask the school to keep a written record. I get asked a lot about if and when law enforcement should be involved. Law enforcement gets involved when there’s serious physical injury or assault. If a kid’s getting pushed that probably isn’t physical injury, but if a problem persists or escalates, and school officials are unable to stop bullying, some parents have consulted attorneys.

That’s one reason that written records are emphasized. It’s also very important that, if law enforcement does get involved, you have a written record and have as much information as possible. Make sure that you understand all these situations before you would escalate into more serious steps, however, as soon as there’s serious physical injury or any kind of injury, then we want to make sure that we take the appropriate action.

Summary

Bullying happens in every school. If it does happen to your child, this chapter can help prepare you. Also, if you take action when your child is being bullied, chances are that there are other children in the school who are having similar experiences. You’re helping them!

One thing that’s very helpful is if your school has a bullying prevention program like the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program or another evidence-based program. This is a great start to reduce bullying and improve the entire school environment including grades! If your school does not have official anti-bullying policies or an active bullying prevention program, work with other parents and your school officials to develop one.

Common questions from parents

What if talking to the school makes it worse for my child?

It’s a legitimate worry (and it does happen). The bigger risk is the other one: if you don’t do something, it will often get worse, and it may not stop unless you take action.

The school wants to sit both kids down together. Should I agree?

No. Mediation assumes two parties at roughly equal standing, which is exactly what bullying is not. In bullying there’s an imbalance of power by definition, so a joint meeting embarrasses your child and is very likely to make it worse.

How long should the school take?

Immediately, and they should tell you the plan. About a week is the outside edge of reasonable. Past that, ask again in writing (and keep the copy).

What exactly should I write down?

Dates as close as you can get them, the names of every child involved and not just the one doing it, where it happened, what was said or done, and who helped your child. Note the helpers (they matter more than parents expect).

What if the school doesn’t seem to have a process?

That’s common, and it usually isn’t because nobody cares. Assume goodwill, ask what their process is, and if there isn’t one, supply the structure yourself: written record, named next steps, a follow-up date. You may not change their policy this year. You can still pin down exactly what happens in your child’s case.

When does law enforcement get involved?

When there’s serious physical injury or assault. If a problem persists or escalates and school officials can’t stop it, some parents have consulted attorneys. That is another reason the written record matters.

What if I find out my own child was involved too?

It happens more than you’d think, and that’s the moment not to get defensive. Let everyone get all the information before anybody makes a decision.

Adapted from Bullying: Truths, Myths, and What To Do! by Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D. Part one covers what to do the day your child tells you. More at mastermoody.com.

References