My parents told me from about age 5 that if a bully picks on me, I should just fight him, because even if I lost, I was unlikely to be bullied again. Bullies don't want to fight; they just want to dominate and intimidate, and if you fight, that makes you inconvenient.
All through elementary school, I had a very intense, persistent, psychopathic bully who wouldn't let up. It was like those incessant attacks over the phone nowadays that drive kids to suicide. My mother and my friend's mother enrolled us in judo, and it wasn't very long before I beat up the bully, much larger than me. He never attacked me again.
When kids in karate class used to come up and ask me what to do about a bully in their lives, I'd tell them that bullies have a lot of pain in their heads, and they think their lives will be better if they pass that pain on to you. The best revenge is simply to stay happy and refuse to accept their mental pain.
In some degree it is precisely the child victim's responsibility. Not a welcome responsibility, and not a pleasant one, but responsibilities in general don't come in welcome and pleasant varieties at our convenience.
Kids that don't face to that, do not become well adjusted adults - always depending on outside forces to intervene, which in many cases, especially in adult life, there will be none.
If parents intervene, nothing usually happens, because the school authorities almost never take any action against the bully. Nor do they do anything to separate the bully and the attacker, so I had to sit in the class with the same psychopath bullying me nonstop for three years. Intervention with the boy's parents just resulted in a shouting match, and intervention with the school resulted in no action at all, so the only prudent course of action was to put me in judo.
My friend's little brother had the same experience, having been beaten up repeatedly by three or four bullies at the same time, with the school taking no action at all, despite repeated requests. So his parents put him and his brother into taekwondo. Once he'd reached some level of proficiency, he took on the victimizers — the group had grown into a mob by this time. All they had to do was beat up the three or four main culprits and the mob dispersed. It was a shock to everyone, because he'd always been such an easy mark before.
If I had a kid in school and the administration did nothing about the bully and refused to let my child defend himself, I'd press criminal charges against the bully.
I was a sissy and a weak shrimp. Nobody in my life was going to send me to martial arts training. Knocking the crap out of my bullies was never an option.
I'm sorry to hear that, but maybe you weren't as helpless as you think.
I was just average height and weight, but I had an inordinate hatred of being bullied. The thought of some kid lording over me and humiliating me drove me to action. I guess I lost control. But it never happened twice.
It's highly dependent on the people and the environment. I talked to one high school freshman who told me the victim gets into trouble if he tries to defend himself, because the school says he should have "deescalated", "which just makes you look weak and pathetic and encourages the bully." Meanwhile, I have kids from other schools where the principal told them they have carte blanche to use their karate skills if they're attacked. My guess is that the second school has less of a bullying problem.
"[T]he principal told them they have carte blanche to use their karate skills if they're attacked. My guess is that the second school has less of a bullying problem."
Agreed. But again, it's a treacherous legal environment today. I am confident that, today, if and when use of karate results in any non-trivial injuries, it will be the end of that program, and most likely that principal's career. Although the tide appears to be turning, only after multiple, rational, publicized court judgments over multiple years will the norm be revised.
There was no karate "program" at the school. These kids learned outside of school, so no one had authority "end the program". At that age, the kids were strong enough to inflict pain, but not "non-trivial injury".
One day in family karate class I taught escape from chokes. It wasn't three days later when a boy at school came at one of the girls in my class and began choking her unprovoked. She used what she'd learned to bust out of the choke and then jammed two fingers in above the boy's clavicle, throwing him back about six feet onto his rear end. No one ever bullied this girl or her friends again. So the one defense move prevented what could have been months of bullying.
Of course, a story of a boy attacking a girl on the playground freaks all us old men out, because when we were kids, any boy who attacked a girl would immediately find himself under a heap of other boys getting the daylights punched out of him, but as one schoolteacher in my class said, "School is messed up nowadays."
What I mean by "program" -- I should have labeled it "policy" -- was that "the principal told them they have carte blanche to use their karate skills if they're attacked"
"At that age, the kids were strong enough to inflict pain, but not 'non-trivial injury'."
That wouldn't even be too important. What *is* important is what a lawsuit and/or the media could label it.
"... So the one defense move prevented what could have been months of bullying."
Good. Again, I'm not arguing against your point of view and actions. I'm only warning us that the world still needs to change, and until that happens, I suggest doing serious preparation and being very cautious implementing any program/policy/system of physical resistance/defense.
I was homeschooled K-12, so I didn't have many resources where to be bullied from, but do you think that children are no longer able to tolerate meanness from other kids as a result of the kind of parenting we have now? Looking back it seems like children were well-able to ignore bothersome peers -- as if they didn't give as much importance to them -- at least, not to the point of being driven to suicide. You seem to have been one of these children. Do you have any thoughts on this? I'm very curious.
I don't know, but I do know that constant, nonstop harassment that can't be escaped can break any person down. My bully was not only in my class, but he and his brothers lived next door to me, so my only way to get away was to go inside the house or leave the block. I was lucky to have very supportive parents and siblings, and actually a whole block of supportive families who knew what those guys were about. The mothers even set up a phone network to alert each other to impending trouble of any kind from those guys.
I couldn't join any traditional ball sports, because these guys were in all of them. Same thing with Scouts, but I don't know why my parents didn't get the idea to put me in a troop at a different school or at church. So I had to be in completely different activities, which I continued to do into adulthood and now old age.
I can tell you from teaching karate at the YMCA that a lot of the problem is so much illegitimacy, leaving kids without adult male companionship, discipline, love and mentoring, so a lot of kids grow up spiritually weaker and more confused. A lot of mothers take the kids to karate class for that reason, but two hours a week of karate can't make up for a full-time dad or grandfather or uncle.
One thing I found about the fatherless girls: While feminists complain about "mansplaining", the fatherless girls will use strategies to get the karate teacher to mansplain to them, because in their minds, mansplaining is male attention that makes them feel cared about.
I saw when teaching college that this lack of father figures causes a lot of students to freak out if an authority figure has a low voice and a masculine delivery.
I think I was certainly helped through the bullying years by my religious education, because I had a clear understanding of what is moral treatment and also of each person's basic dignity, including my own. I don't know how it would have been if I'd been in some kind of peace-and-love evangelical sect, but the Catholics have some saints who were really bad-ass warriors and protected people, so I never felt guilty on those rare occasions when I had to fight, even if I lost.
I grew up outside—no supervision, just bikes, dirt, and whatever we made up. The world had danger, sure. But it wasn’t scary—it was how we learned to handle it.
Risk calibration takes practice, not avoidance. We’ve confused safety with strength, but resilience comes from small failures and figuring things out—not from avoiding every bump.
I was the child of Silents (1928-45), and am a GenX (1965-80); in-between were the Boomers (1946-64). I grew up in the countryside on the East Coast of the US, so things were ridiculously safe, and we had a lot of autonomy.
Part of it was as simple as car seat regulations, which prohibited kids from being piled into pickup beds and stations wagons in groups (sports, scouts, other trustworthy parents), and part of it was simple suburbanization, with bike-unfriendly roads that required more parental transportation.
Sadly, I think part of it was more diverse communities, which amplified fears of “bad influences”.
So kids were increasingly stuck watching TV and nowadays staring into shiny rectangles.
Adolescents these days are also more coddled. In my cohort, everyone had drivers licenses, which upped the expectation of personal responsibility, but also granted more autonomy.
I think parents, like generals, are always fighting the previous war.
I'm also a Gen Xer; and had considerable autonomy despite the '70s and '80s being high-crime eras with a fair number of serial killers. My parents were Silent Generation, so they were mostly worried about me starving to death or dying of disease (three of my mother's nine siblings had died in infancy in the pre-vaccine 1920s, and both parents grew up poor and hungry during the Depression).
Late Boomers and Gen X grew up to be much more fearful of serial killers, pedophiles, and kidnappers; as those dominated the headlines in our formative years and many of us knew or knew of a trusted adult (teacher, coach, priest/pastor) who was later convicted of child sex crimes. This resulted in Millennials and Gen Z being allowed far less freedom from constant supervision - and spending more time socializing online, which started with Millennials and accelerated with Gen Z as now smartphones were available. Of course, it didn't occur to anyone that an entirely new set of dangers would materialize from this...
I rehearse scenarios with my two daughters and equip them not only with the language to say when they’re made uncomfortable by someone and the physical steps to take to extricate themselves, but the self-esteem to know they deserve to be treated with respect. In fact, the simple phrase, “I deserve to be treated with respect,” neutralized a senior bullying man at my corporate workplace years ago. I’ll never forget how much courage it took for me to say it after I learned this, the next time he bullied me. He used constant, low-level intimidation. For example, telling me the violent way he’d treated another woman, as if to indicate he could do that same thing to me. Then he continually asked me to do his jobs. When I suddenly refused, he was astonished and got mean and insulting. That’s when I used the line. He never bothered me again.
I was one of those weird dorky kids that bullies instinctively target. However, I will say that I was never bullied when I was out playing with the neighborhood kids - a mixed-age group. It is absolutely true that older kids will often intervene on behalf of the younger kids, and in my experience once that happened, the bully would desist as the targeted kid had a protector.
All of my experiences where I was actually bullied happened at school, in my own age group. Since I was a girl, it was rarely overt violence (except for the time when I pushed the girl who bullied me off the stage in the auditorium). Rather, it was shunning, exclusion, gossip, rumors, and insults that were whispered loudly enough for me to hear. It was quite easy for the adults to turn a blind eye to this, especially as my female bully was an expert at acting sweet, innocent and compliant with teachers - whereas I was that weird, awkward girl who tended to argue with adults, and thus was not a favorite with them.
It is also very true these days that the definition of "bullying" has expanded to include just general kid rudeness or jerkishness - i.e., not being invited to someone's birthday party is often considered to be a form of bullying by today's overly-protective parents.
I often wonder how the freest generation of children/teenagers ended up being such controlling parents.
I think Lenore's point that there is no such thing as a risk-free choice is something that has been forgotten. Parents who remember this could give their children the freedom that we had.
"I often wonder how the freest generation of children/teenagers ended up being such controlling parents."
There has been profound shift in America over at least a half-century from something like live-and-let-live to complete micro-management of peoples' personal lives. I've lived it. Where this shift in the culture has come from, I'll leave to you to think about.
It's the same over here in England 🏴 I wonder if the Internet had anything to do with it. It gave parents a chance to tell each other how scary the world is.
I think the internet has everything to do with it. Here in the US, we've always had crime, but it wasn't being blasted to us in our feeds 24/7.
Plus with the proliferation of AI and bots we often see news stories that aren't even remotely true presented as fact. And humans are nearly as good at sniffing out falsehoods and they think are.
My personal two cents is that upwardly mobile and ambitious middle class people want to emulate the behaviors of the truly rich, who have for a much longer time, treated their children like thorough bred horses.
This essay is like a treatise on criminal justice that focuses only on what victims did wrong that caused them to be victimized, with a chapter on what potential victims should do to avoid being victimized. The bully—the perpetrator—is entirely absent.
Bullying here is framed not as an act of domination or cruelty, but as one of many vaguely unpleasant “rotten experiences” that help kids build resilience. The suggestion is that if children are trained well enough—emotionally coached, taught verbal jiu-jitsu, and exposed to just the right amount of discomfort—they’ll emerge stronger. But that logic places the burden of adaptation on the child being harmed, rather than on the adult world that should be intervening to stop the harm.
The moral actor in this dynamic—the bully—is curiously missing. There's no serious engagement with the reality that some children behave with deliberate cruelty and that this behavior, left unchecked, becomes a source of real suffering. That kind of malice may be developmentally normal and still morally unacceptable. Both things can be true. But this essay doesn’t go there.
Some children are more vulnerable to bullies than others. That’s simply a fact. Any framework that avoids this—by either sentimentalizing childhood conflict or reframing cruelty as social-emotional growth opportunity—fails the very children most at risk.
It’s also surprising to see an essay like this under the After Babel banner. One of that project’s stated aims is to understand how institutions fail to uphold norms and protect the vulnerable. In this case, the failure isn’t just institutional—it’s philosophical. The question of how adults should exercise moral authority in the face of intentional cruelty goes unanswered.
There is no serious solution to bullying that does not reckon with the bully as a moral actor who must be named, constrained, and isolated if necessary. Everything else—resilience training, unstructured play, clever comebacks—is secondary. At best, it’s an incomplete strategy. At worst, it’s a deflection that quietly shifts responsibility away from the people doing harm, and onto the people receiving it.
We've overplayed our hand with bullying. These days everything is bullying. It's a fact of adult life that you will not get a long with every person you meet and interact with. And as such, you need to tailor your behaviors and responses to such people. But, in schools today we teach a communal, wishy-washy approach that labels the most miniscule social slighting as a capital offense.
For example, in a neighboring district to mine, I have a friend whose 1st grade daughter and her little pack of pals have a special handshake they all do with each other. Well, someone who isn't part of the pack felt left out and went to the teacher. As a result, my friend's daughter had to write a paragraph for homework on inclusion and being nice to everyone. This isn't the real world.
So, yes, the points laid out in this article are excellent and I totally agree we need more free, unstructured play, but I also thing we need to re-frame the concept of bullying and what it truly constitutes.
The problem there is the kid that ran to the teacher for being left out. I would tell my daughter, at a very early age, that you won't be invited to everything and it's ok. "Inclusivity " has been taken to a whole new level. Ridiculous, IMO.
The standard fallacy is to see what you've preserved by keeping kids inside (their physical safety, protection from bullying) but not see what kids have been denied (personal growth, confidence they can live in the world, resilience). You are really harming these kids compared to what they could have become.
If you want a healthy strong kid, they need to learn to overcome adversity. They need to gain confidence in themselves by learning to make good decisions in uncertain, stressful situations. This can be done in a step-by-step, controlled way where your kid is actually safe even though s/he doesn't necessarily feel it at the time. Otherwise, your kid will collapse when things get tough.
If you want to get strong, you lift weights. Lifting progressively heavier weights breaks down your muscle fibers allowing them to rebuild to make you stronger. The more you put into the lift, the more sacrifice and struggle, the stronger you get. Sitting on a couch "safe" in your home makes you less safe in the long run.
This essay seems to be missing an honest analysis of much of the de facto free play in a society that doesn't share a "moral universe," with kids that have such limited free play that when they get it they are terrible at playing. I've seen truly wonderful (from the periphery) free play where it is truly mixed aged and the children PLAY, creating stories and challenges and adventures. And I've seen what sadly passes for free play in the eyes of many parents, it's full of intense competition, no self-handicapping or inclusion, and patterns of harassment (stealing play items and generally antagonizing others who are just trying to be left alone.) And, more often than not, these children's parents don't believe they are beholden to a broader community of adults, like a neighbor or other adult giving a directive. If there are no older children, and the children have been in controlling environments since infancy, and the parents don't exist in the same moral universe wherein some ways of treating other people are just wrong...well, it's not a great play situation and does more harm than good. That's NOT to say that true mixed-age free play isn't incredibly important and should be preserved, but that it's harder in America than it should be, and is not an automatic thing as soon as kids are interacting. Adults should take some responsibility in creating a positive environment with shared norms, and THEN release the kids to run wild.
I wasn't bullied until I transferred to a prestigious New England boarding school. It took the form of persistent emotional abuse from my roommate and two other boys in my dorm. It was the early 70s, and the school practiced institutionalized emotional neglect of its minor charges. I had no recourse, nor did I have any allies. The very place I lived was unsafe emotionally and psychologically. As one of my bullies said later when I confronted him, "it was the done thing." It took the end of the school year nine after nine months to end it. Some kids are savage bastards.
I actually think we have more independence and take umbrage at your blue/red remark. My kids are being raised in NYC and spent last Friday when there was no school riding bikes in a multi-age group and playing capture the flag in a courtyard.
I’ve been recommended to read that from my uni tutor and will add it to my list.
As a parent of 5, 3 who seemed to have grown up in a different generation without mobile devices and playing in the ditch, catching tadpoles, playing with all kids in the community, fights and disagreements included (there was also gang bullying), they are different humans to the 2 who are part of the anxious generation.
I try to work with my teenagers on boundaries and where they can go. They do venture quite far (in today’s view), 30 min bus ride to see friends at 12 & 15. That brings alot of negative comments from others but the alternative? Sit at home miserable, sat on a device, never doing anything stupid and not finding their own boundaries, not building relationships with peers, not figuring out the dynamics in relationships with others.
My mother didn’t know where I was from 9am when I got kicked out until 9pm when I came in. Not that I believe we should go back to that as we want our children safe.
But the statistics show it’s now safer than it’s been before (although the bad stuff is highlighted in the media more) and young people are not venturing as far, literally to the end of the street so not exploring at all.
My parents told me from about age 5 that if a bully picks on me, I should just fight him, because even if I lost, I was unlikely to be bullied again. Bullies don't want to fight; they just want to dominate and intimidate, and if you fight, that makes you inconvenient.
All through elementary school, I had a very intense, persistent, psychopathic bully who wouldn't let up. It was like those incessant attacks over the phone nowadays that drive kids to suicide. My mother and my friend's mother enrolled us in judo, and it wasn't very long before I beat up the bully, much larger than me. He never attacked me again.
When kids in karate class used to come up and ask me what to do about a bully in their lives, I'd tell them that bullies have a lot of pain in their heads, and they think their lives will be better if they pass that pain on to you. The best revenge is simply to stay happy and refuse to accept their mental pain.
It's not the child victim's responsibility to stop his or her bully, especially not by violent means. It requires parental intervention at a minimum.
In some degree it is precisely the child victim's responsibility. Not a welcome responsibility, and not a pleasant one, but responsibilities in general don't come in welcome and pleasant varieties at our convenience.
Kids that don't face to that, do not become well adjusted adults - always depending on outside forces to intervene, which in many cases, especially in adult life, there will be none.
If parents intervene, nothing usually happens, because the school authorities almost never take any action against the bully. Nor do they do anything to separate the bully and the attacker, so I had to sit in the class with the same psychopath bullying me nonstop for three years. Intervention with the boy's parents just resulted in a shouting match, and intervention with the school resulted in no action at all, so the only prudent course of action was to put me in judo.
My friend's little brother had the same experience, having been beaten up repeatedly by three or four bullies at the same time, with the school taking no action at all, despite repeated requests. So his parents put him and his brother into taekwondo. Once he'd reached some level of proficiency, he took on the victimizers — the group had grown into a mob by this time. All they had to do was beat up the three or four main culprits and the mob dispersed. It was a shock to everyone, because he'd always been such an easy mark before.
If I had a kid in school and the administration did nothing about the bully and refused to let my child defend himself, I'd press criminal charges against the bully.
"It requires parental intervention at a minimum."
Not at all. Indeed, bullies do not like to get the crap smacked of them. Just unleash a torrent of good, hard punches all over their face. Game over.
I was a sissy and a weak shrimp. Nobody in my life was going to send me to martial arts training. Knocking the crap out of my bullies was never an option.
"I was a sissy and a weak shrimp."
I'm sorry to hear that, but maybe you weren't as helpless as you think.
I was just average height and weight, but I had an inordinate hatred of being bullied. The thought of some kid lording over me and humiliating me drove me to action. I guess I lost control. But it never happened twice.
"My parents told me ... I should just fight [a bully] ... [I]t wasn't very long before I beat up the bully"
I agree. But this isn't 1970 any more, and if you played out the same script today, both you and your kid would be hauled, separately, into courts.
It's highly dependent on the people and the environment. I talked to one high school freshman who told me the victim gets into trouble if he tries to defend himself, because the school says he should have "deescalated", "which just makes you look weak and pathetic and encourages the bully." Meanwhile, I have kids from other schools where the principal told them they have carte blanche to use their karate skills if they're attacked. My guess is that the second school has less of a bullying problem.
"[T]he principal told them they have carte blanche to use their karate skills if they're attacked. My guess is that the second school has less of a bullying problem."
Agreed. But again, it's a treacherous legal environment today. I am confident that, today, if and when use of karate results in any non-trivial injuries, it will be the end of that program, and most likely that principal's career. Although the tide appears to be turning, only after multiple, rational, publicized court judgments over multiple years will the norm be revised.
There was no karate "program" at the school. These kids learned outside of school, so no one had authority "end the program". At that age, the kids were strong enough to inflict pain, but not "non-trivial injury".
One day in family karate class I taught escape from chokes. It wasn't three days later when a boy at school came at one of the girls in my class and began choking her unprovoked. She used what she'd learned to bust out of the choke and then jammed two fingers in above the boy's clavicle, throwing him back about six feet onto his rear end. No one ever bullied this girl or her friends again. So the one defense move prevented what could have been months of bullying.
Of course, a story of a boy attacking a girl on the playground freaks all us old men out, because when we were kids, any boy who attacked a girl would immediately find himself under a heap of other boys getting the daylights punched out of him, but as one schoolteacher in my class said, "School is messed up nowadays."
"There was no karate 'program' at the school."
What I mean by "program" -- I should have labeled it "policy" -- was that "the principal told them they have carte blanche to use their karate skills if they're attacked"
"At that age, the kids were strong enough to inflict pain, but not 'non-trivial injury'."
That wouldn't even be too important. What *is* important is what a lawsuit and/or the media could label it.
"... So the one defense move prevented what could have been months of bullying."
Good. Again, I'm not arguing against your point of view and actions. I'm only warning us that the world still needs to change, and until that happens, I suggest doing serious preparation and being very cautious implementing any program/policy/system of physical resistance/defense.
I was homeschooled K-12, so I didn't have many resources where to be bullied from, but do you think that children are no longer able to tolerate meanness from other kids as a result of the kind of parenting we have now? Looking back it seems like children were well-able to ignore bothersome peers -- as if they didn't give as much importance to them -- at least, not to the point of being driven to suicide. You seem to have been one of these children. Do you have any thoughts on this? I'm very curious.
I don't know, but I do know that constant, nonstop harassment that can't be escaped can break any person down. My bully was not only in my class, but he and his brothers lived next door to me, so my only way to get away was to go inside the house or leave the block. I was lucky to have very supportive parents and siblings, and actually a whole block of supportive families who knew what those guys were about. The mothers even set up a phone network to alert each other to impending trouble of any kind from those guys.
I couldn't join any traditional ball sports, because these guys were in all of them. Same thing with Scouts, but I don't know why my parents didn't get the idea to put me in a troop at a different school or at church. So I had to be in completely different activities, which I continued to do into adulthood and now old age.
I can tell you from teaching karate at the YMCA that a lot of the problem is so much illegitimacy, leaving kids without adult male companionship, discipline, love and mentoring, so a lot of kids grow up spiritually weaker and more confused. A lot of mothers take the kids to karate class for that reason, but two hours a week of karate can't make up for a full-time dad or grandfather or uncle.
One thing I found about the fatherless girls: While feminists complain about "mansplaining", the fatherless girls will use strategies to get the karate teacher to mansplain to them, because in their minds, mansplaining is male attention that makes them feel cared about.
I saw when teaching college that this lack of father figures causes a lot of students to freak out if an authority figure has a low voice and a masculine delivery.
I think I was certainly helped through the bullying years by my religious education, because I had a clear understanding of what is moral treatment and also of each person's basic dignity, including my own. I don't know how it would have been if I'd been in some kind of peace-and-love evangelical sect, but the Catholics have some saints who were really bad-ass warriors and protected people, so I never felt guilty on those rare occasions when I had to fight, even if I lost.
I grew up outside—no supervision, just bikes, dirt, and whatever we made up. The world had danger, sure. But it wasn’t scary—it was how we learned to handle it.
Risk calibration takes practice, not avoidance. We’ve confused safety with strength, but resilience comes from small failures and figuring things out—not from avoiding every bump.
To which parental generation do you refer?
I was the child of Silents (1928-45), and am a GenX (1965-80); in-between were the Boomers (1946-64). I grew up in the countryside on the East Coast of the US, so things were ridiculously safe, and we had a lot of autonomy.
But GenY/Millennials (1981-1996) and GenZ/Homelanders (1997-2010) were subject to a lot of “stranger danger” propaganda on child abduction and sexual predators, most of which was greatly exaggerated https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_children_panic and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abduction_scare_of_2002 .
Part of it was as simple as car seat regulations, which prohibited kids from being piled into pickup beds and stations wagons in groups (sports, scouts, other trustworthy parents), and part of it was simple suburbanization, with bike-unfriendly roads that required more parental transportation.
Sadly, I think part of it was more diverse communities, which amplified fears of “bad influences”.
So kids were increasingly stuck watching TV and nowadays staring into shiny rectangles.
Adolescents these days are also more coddled. In my cohort, everyone had drivers licenses, which upped the expectation of personal responsibility, but also granted more autonomy.
I think parents, like generals, are always fighting the previous war.
I'm also a Gen Xer; and had considerable autonomy despite the '70s and '80s being high-crime eras with a fair number of serial killers. My parents were Silent Generation, so they were mostly worried about me starving to death or dying of disease (three of my mother's nine siblings had died in infancy in the pre-vaccine 1920s, and both parents grew up poor and hungry during the Depression).
Late Boomers and Gen X grew up to be much more fearful of serial killers, pedophiles, and kidnappers; as those dominated the headlines in our formative years and many of us knew or knew of a trusted adult (teacher, coach, priest/pastor) who was later convicted of child sex crimes. This resulted in Millennials and Gen Z being allowed far less freedom from constant supervision - and spending more time socializing online, which started with Millennials and accelerated with Gen Z as now smartphones were available. Of course, it didn't occur to anyone that an entirely new set of dangers would materialize from this...
I rehearse scenarios with my two daughters and equip them not only with the language to say when they’re made uncomfortable by someone and the physical steps to take to extricate themselves, but the self-esteem to know they deserve to be treated with respect. In fact, the simple phrase, “I deserve to be treated with respect,” neutralized a senior bullying man at my corporate workplace years ago. I’ll never forget how much courage it took for me to say it after I learned this, the next time he bullied me. He used constant, low-level intimidation. For example, telling me the violent way he’d treated another woman, as if to indicate he could do that same thing to me. Then he continually asked me to do his jobs. When I suddenly refused, he was astonished and got mean and insulting. That’s when I used the line. He never bothered me again.
This is gold. Thank you.
I was one of those weird dorky kids that bullies instinctively target. However, I will say that I was never bullied when I was out playing with the neighborhood kids - a mixed-age group. It is absolutely true that older kids will often intervene on behalf of the younger kids, and in my experience once that happened, the bully would desist as the targeted kid had a protector.
All of my experiences where I was actually bullied happened at school, in my own age group. Since I was a girl, it was rarely overt violence (except for the time when I pushed the girl who bullied me off the stage in the auditorium). Rather, it was shunning, exclusion, gossip, rumors, and insults that were whispered loudly enough for me to hear. It was quite easy for the adults to turn a blind eye to this, especially as my female bully was an expert at acting sweet, innocent and compliant with teachers - whereas I was that weird, awkward girl who tended to argue with adults, and thus was not a favorite with them.
It is also very true these days that the definition of "bullying" has expanded to include just general kid rudeness or jerkishness - i.e., not being invited to someone's birthday party is often considered to be a form of bullying by today's overly-protective parents.
I often wonder how the freest generation of children/teenagers ended up being such controlling parents.
I think Lenore's point that there is no such thing as a risk-free choice is something that has been forgotten. Parents who remember this could give their children the freedom that we had.
"I often wonder how the freest generation of children/teenagers ended up being such controlling parents."
There has been profound shift in America over at least a half-century from something like live-and-let-live to complete micro-management of peoples' personal lives. I've lived it. Where this shift in the culture has come from, I'll leave to you to think about.
It's the same over here in England 🏴 I wonder if the Internet had anything to do with it. It gave parents a chance to tell each other how scary the world is.
I think the internet has everything to do with it. Here in the US, we've always had crime, but it wasn't being blasted to us in our feeds 24/7.
Plus with the proliferation of AI and bots we often see news stories that aren't even remotely true presented as fact. And humans are nearly as good at sniffing out falsehoods and they think are.
My personal two cents is that upwardly mobile and ambitious middle class people want to emulate the behaviors of the truly rich, who have for a much longer time, treated their children like thorough bred horses.
I dunno. I was upwardly mobile, but my kids never even wanted to go out, however much I encouraged them.
This essay is like a treatise on criminal justice that focuses only on what victims did wrong that caused them to be victimized, with a chapter on what potential victims should do to avoid being victimized. The bully—the perpetrator—is entirely absent.
Bullying here is framed not as an act of domination or cruelty, but as one of many vaguely unpleasant “rotten experiences” that help kids build resilience. The suggestion is that if children are trained well enough—emotionally coached, taught verbal jiu-jitsu, and exposed to just the right amount of discomfort—they’ll emerge stronger. But that logic places the burden of adaptation on the child being harmed, rather than on the adult world that should be intervening to stop the harm.
The moral actor in this dynamic—the bully—is curiously missing. There's no serious engagement with the reality that some children behave with deliberate cruelty and that this behavior, left unchecked, becomes a source of real suffering. That kind of malice may be developmentally normal and still morally unacceptable. Both things can be true. But this essay doesn’t go there.
Some children are more vulnerable to bullies than others. That’s simply a fact. Any framework that avoids this—by either sentimentalizing childhood conflict or reframing cruelty as social-emotional growth opportunity—fails the very children most at risk.
It’s also surprising to see an essay like this under the After Babel banner. One of that project’s stated aims is to understand how institutions fail to uphold norms and protect the vulnerable. In this case, the failure isn’t just institutional—it’s philosophical. The question of how adults should exercise moral authority in the face of intentional cruelty goes unanswered.
There is no serious solution to bullying that does not reckon with the bully as a moral actor who must be named, constrained, and isolated if necessary. Everything else—resilience training, unstructured play, clever comebacks—is secondary. At best, it’s an incomplete strategy. At worst, it’s a deflection that quietly shifts responsibility away from the people doing harm, and onto the people receiving it.
We've overplayed our hand with bullying. These days everything is bullying. It's a fact of adult life that you will not get a long with every person you meet and interact with. And as such, you need to tailor your behaviors and responses to such people. But, in schools today we teach a communal, wishy-washy approach that labels the most miniscule social slighting as a capital offense.
For example, in a neighboring district to mine, I have a friend whose 1st grade daughter and her little pack of pals have a special handshake they all do with each other. Well, someone who isn't part of the pack felt left out and went to the teacher. As a result, my friend's daughter had to write a paragraph for homework on inclusion and being nice to everyone. This isn't the real world.
So, yes, the points laid out in this article are excellent and I totally agree we need more free, unstructured play, but I also thing we need to re-frame the concept of bullying and what it truly constitutes.
The problem there is the kid that ran to the teacher for being left out. I would tell my daughter, at a very early age, that you won't be invited to everything and it's ok. "Inclusivity " has been taken to a whole new level. Ridiculous, IMO.
Love the way this is a "new problem". Watch "My Bodyguard" for the answer.
The standard fallacy is to see what you've preserved by keeping kids inside (their physical safety, protection from bullying) but not see what kids have been denied (personal growth, confidence they can live in the world, resilience). You are really harming these kids compared to what they could have become.
If you want a healthy strong kid, they need to learn to overcome adversity. They need to gain confidence in themselves by learning to make good decisions in uncertain, stressful situations. This can be done in a step-by-step, controlled way where your kid is actually safe even though s/he doesn't necessarily feel it at the time. Otherwise, your kid will collapse when things get tough.
If you want to get strong, you lift weights. Lifting progressively heavier weights breaks down your muscle fibers allowing them to rebuild to make you stronger. The more you put into the lift, the more sacrifice and struggle, the stronger you get. Sitting on a couch "safe" in your home makes you less safe in the long run.
This essay seems to be missing an honest analysis of much of the de facto free play in a society that doesn't share a "moral universe," with kids that have such limited free play that when they get it they are terrible at playing. I've seen truly wonderful (from the periphery) free play where it is truly mixed aged and the children PLAY, creating stories and challenges and adventures. And I've seen what sadly passes for free play in the eyes of many parents, it's full of intense competition, no self-handicapping or inclusion, and patterns of harassment (stealing play items and generally antagonizing others who are just trying to be left alone.) And, more often than not, these children's parents don't believe they are beholden to a broader community of adults, like a neighbor or other adult giving a directive. If there are no older children, and the children have been in controlling environments since infancy, and the parents don't exist in the same moral universe wherein some ways of treating other people are just wrong...well, it's not a great play situation and does more harm than good. That's NOT to say that true mixed-age free play isn't incredibly important and should be preserved, but that it's harder in America than it should be, and is not an automatic thing as soon as kids are interacting. Adults should take some responsibility in creating a positive environment with shared norms, and THEN release the kids to run wild.
I wasn't bullied until I transferred to a prestigious New England boarding school. It took the form of persistent emotional abuse from my roommate and two other boys in my dorm. It was the early 70s, and the school practiced institutionalized emotional neglect of its minor charges. I had no recourse, nor did I have any allies. The very place I lived was unsafe emotionally and psychologically. As one of my bullies said later when I confronted him, "it was the done thing." It took the end of the school year nine after nine months to end it. Some kids are savage bastards.
Are parents in Blue-ish cities even ALLOWED to leave their children unsupervised these days?
I actually think we have more independence and take umbrage at your blue/red remark. My kids are being raised in NYC and spent last Friday when there was no school riding bikes in a multi-age group and playing capture the flag in a courtyard.
I’ve been recommended to read that from my uni tutor and will add it to my list.
As a parent of 5, 3 who seemed to have grown up in a different generation without mobile devices and playing in the ditch, catching tadpoles, playing with all kids in the community, fights and disagreements included (there was also gang bullying), they are different humans to the 2 who are part of the anxious generation.
I try to work with my teenagers on boundaries and where they can go. They do venture quite far (in today’s view), 30 min bus ride to see friends at 12 & 15. That brings alot of negative comments from others but the alternative? Sit at home miserable, sat on a device, never doing anything stupid and not finding their own boundaries, not building relationships with peers, not figuring out the dynamics in relationships with others.
My mother didn’t know where I was from 9am when I got kicked out until 9pm when I came in. Not that I believe we should go back to that as we want our children safe.
But the statistics show it’s now safer than it’s been before (although the bad stuff is highlighted in the media more) and young people are not venturing as far, literally to the end of the street so not exploring at all.