Many adults carry invisible wounds that had their origins in their childhood. They began in a classroom, playground, neighbourhood, and other spaces. For many children, bullying is not a passing phase. It is an experience that quietly shapes how they see themselves, how they trust others, and how they navigate relationships for years to come.

A cruel nickname repeated every day. Being left out of every game. Rumours whispered behind their back. Teachers dismissing concerns as “children being children.” Parents being told their child is “too sensitive.”

The recent Deccan Herald article, “When Cries for Help Go Unheard: The Lifelong Scars of School Bullying,” brings attention to this often-overlooked reality through the stories of survivors whose emotional pain continued long after they left school. My views on the psychological impact of bullying were featured in the article, highlighting why children’s pleas for help should never be dismissed.

https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india/karnataka/bengaluru/when-cries-for-help-go-unheard-the-lifelong-scars-of-school-bullying-4073817

Bullying Doesn’t End When School Ends

Many people assume that childhood bullying is something children eventually “grow out of.”

The truth is more complicated. While the bullying may stop, the situation may change over time, yet the beliefs children develop about themselves often remain.

Children naturally depend on adults to help them make sense of difficult experiences. When those adults fail to recognise or respond to bullying, children frequently draw painful conclusions:

• Something must be wrong with me.
• I deserve to be treated this way.
• Nobody will protect me.
• Speaking up doesn’t help.

These beliefs rarely stay confined to childhood. They often become the foundation for anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, perfectionism, people-pleasing, over-compensation, difficulties trusting others in adulthood, etc.

When Children’s Cries for Help Go Unheard

In the Deccan Herald article, I shared an observation I see repeatedly in therapy:

When children’s repeated cries for help are dismissed, they often begin to believe something is inherently wrong with them. During their growing years, this message can become deeply internalised, leaving them vulnerable to anxiety, depression and low self-worth well into adulthood.

This is perhaps one of the most damaging consequences of bullying. The child is no longer only fighting the bully. They begin fighting themselves. Their inner dialogue slowly becomes another bully, criticising, doubting and blaming them long after the original bullying has ended.

Isolation or being excluded Can Hurt as Much as Physical Bullying

When people think about bullying, they often imagine physical aggression. But emotional exclusion can be equally devastating. Being deliberately ignored, excluded from group activities, classmates who refuse to speak to you, erstwhile friends now no longer.  Watching everyone else belong while you stand alone.

Social isolation sends a powerful psychological message to children: You don’t belong.

Because human beings are wired for connection, repeated experiences of exclusion activate the same emotional pain pathways associated with physical injury. This can result in feelings of loneliness, shame, social anxiety and chronic self-doubt that persist for years or may show up when facing stressful situations even in adulthood.

The Long-Term Mental Health Effects of Bullying

Research consistently shows that prolonged bullying increases the risk of:

• Anxiety disorders
• Depression
• Low self-esteem
• Social anxiety
• Difficulty trusting others
• Challenge managing emotions
• Relationship challenges
• Self-harm and suicidal thoughts in severe cases

Many adults seeking therapy today are not simply processing recent stress. They are revisiting experiences from childhood that were never acknowledged or healed.

Why Some Children Never Tell Anyone

Adults often ask
“Why didn’t they tell someone?”
Many children do.
The bigger question is:
“What happened after they did?”

When their concerns are minimised…
If they’re told to “ignore it”…
Or teachers defend the bullies or don’t take it seriously…
If parents dismiss it as normal…

Children quickly learn that asking for help is unsafe. Silence becomes a survival strategy. Ironically, this silence is many a time mistaken for resilience.

What Parents and Schools Can Do Differently

Preventing lifelong emotional harm requires more than anti-bullying policies. It requires availability of emotionally safe adults for children. Parents and educators can make an enormous difference by:

• Taking every report of bullying seriously. Offering a safe space for children to express their feelings and share their experiences/
• Listening without immediately offering solutions or judgment. The more the adults are into devices, the less listening the children get.
• Looking beyond physical injuries to notice emotional withdrawal or any significant changes in behaviour.
• Encouraging children to describe their experiences without fear of blame.
• Responding consistently rather than treating incidents as isolated events.
• Taking appropriate action commensurate to the incident.  Teachers can discuss with colleagues and seniors to arrive at solutions.
• Having a firm policy around bullying and ensuring that all students, teachers and parents are aware of it and collaborate to ensure a safe environment for all.
• Creating classrooms where empathy and inclusion are actively practised.

Children may forget every lesson taught in school. But they rarely forget whether they felt safe there.

Healing Is Possible

Adults who experienced bullying often believe they should have “moved on by now.” Healing doesn’t happen because time passes.  Healing happens when painful experiences are finally understood, validated and processed.

Therapy can help people recognise that the shame they carry was never theirs to begin with. As they rebuild self-worth and healthier ways of relating to others, many discover that their childhood no longer has to define their future. The scars may tell a story, but they do not have to write the ending.

Read the Full Article

My comments on the lifelong psychological impact of school bullying were featured in the Deccan Herald article:

When Cries for Help Go Unheard: The Lifelong Scars of School Bullying

Final Thoughts

Bullying is often dismissed as a childhood experience that children will eventually “grow out of.” Yet for many adults, the echoes of those experiences continue to influence confidence, relationships and mental wellbeing decades later.

Every child deserves to know that when they speak up, someone will listen and that they will be believed and supported in their difficult experience. Because sometimes the most powerful intervention is not having the perfect answer. It is making sure a child never has to feel alone in their pain.

Also read 5 ways by which we inadvertently encourage or condone online bullying/shaming/trolling | Inner Dawn Counselling

About the Author

Kala Balasubramanian is a Psychotherapist, CTA, PTSTA (Psychotherapy), Trainer, Supervisor, and Founder of Inner Dawn Counselling and Training Services LLP. She works with individuals, couples, groups, and organisations to foster emotional wellbeing, healthier relationships, resilience, and psychologically safe workplaces. Her work focuses on helping people understand the impact of stress, relationships, communication patterns, and emotional health on everyday life.

The post Bullying, Scars that last from school to adult life first appeared on Inner Dawn Counselling.

Bullying in childhood can happen at any age and then any environment.  It can happen at school, on way to school, in the neighborhood, in the playground, online – on social media, chat applications and so on.  Bullying leaves a long term impact on the child’s psyche, perspectives, coping mechanism and even personality.

At the same time children can be bullies too.  They can bully other children, bully teachers, and bully their parents too.

Yes, children bullying parents, happens more often than one might recon.  This is some thing that leaves the parents feel helpless and frustrated.  It can also make them anxious and worried for their ward’s safety and well being.

Bullying in any form needs to be acknowledged, tackled, and addressed at the earliest possible.  But especially when it comes to parents being bullied by their child, it presents a whole new set of challenges for the parents.  This is applicable to young children to adolescents to young adults.

When it comes to bullying, blackmailing, threatening etc by children we need to be aware of two very distinct scenarios.   (Though these terms might seem harsh about the child, parents need to acknowledge that there is a problem first, if they want to address it.  Denying it or hiding it or justifying such behavior only aggravates the problem. )

The child’s life or safety is at Risk:

If the child threatens of self harm in any possible way and you as a parent believe that your child might harm themselves, posing a risk to their life or safety or if there is a history of self harm, then it needs to be taken seriously and appropriate action needs to be taken to ensure the child’s safety and not just give in to the demand or threat.

The child’s life or safety is not at Risk:

Rest of this article talks about this scenario.

Children can engage in many different difficult behaviors to get their way with parents.  The child could

• Threaten and be manipulative
• Throw temper tantrums by shouting, screaming, throwing things, slamming doors, crying inconsolably, etc.
• Behave in an aggressive, rude and disrespectful manner
• Be difficult, uncontrollable and break rules consistently
• Become verbally abusive, put down or insult parents
• …. and so on

The child knows what buttons to press to get their parents to a point where they give in to the child’s demands.

Each one of these behaviors individually could have other genuine underlying reasons which can be addressed and worked with.   But when the child engages in these undesirable behaviors consistently, particularly with a purpose to manipulate the parents to get something that they want, and becomes severe, then that would be bullying and is maladaptive.

This is very different from the child being nice or getting good grades or being compliant to get what they want from parents, which would be an adaptive behavior.

Before we get into why this may happen and what can be done about it, it is important to remember that when a child is born, it has some traits based on the genes.  All the other behavior and personality gets shaped through how the child is brought up and what the child experiences in its world, be it home, school and outside.  Hence parent’s behavior and parenting approach plays a key part in how the child grows up and the child’s behavior.

Some parenting approaches that actually enable bullying by the child

1. Parents giving in to their child’s unreasonable demands to stop these unwanted behaviors, or providing excuses for their child’s misbehavior. When the child wants something and engages in an undesirable behavior, and when the parent gives in, this reinforces the behavior. That is – the child learns that if I behave in this way, I will get what I want.
2. When parents operate from a space of guilt. As a parent you are doing the best that you can for your children. No matter what your financial situation is, no matter your career progression, no matter how much time you are able to spend with your children, there is no need for you to look at parenting through the glasses of guilt. This can lead to not setting up clear and strong relevant requisite limits, boundaries, rules for the child, over indulging the child etc.
3. Inconsistency of parenting approach between the parents / parents and other parental figures like grandparents etc, make it very difficult to set clearly defined boundaries and limits for the child that is consistent and age appropriate. Children keep testing the limits that the parent sets for them, and gradually keep checking if the parent reacts to the breaching of the limits and if they really have to face the consequences.  When the child breaks a rule/limit / boundary and there are no consequences to it, then the child learns that it is OK for them to break those limits and boundaries.
4. If there is significant marital conflict or a possibility of a divorce then again the parents might try to overcompensate by not setting or adhering to the boundaries and limits for the child. Or when the child breaks the limits or boundaries the parent doesn’t enforce the consequences.
5. Overprotective parents, who do not want that child to face any problems or fail in any manner. Parents get engaged and involved in every other activity or problem that the child faces and try to ensure that it is completed and this results in the child not being able to take responsibility for their own actions and deliverable. But it could make the child feel entitled or make the child lose confidence in themselves, that they cannot do things on their own.

If you realize that your child is bullying you as parents, what can be done?

 Stop giving into their unreasonable demands in order to stop the tantrums and undesirable behavior.  The child learns that, to get what I want, I can throw a tantrum or be difficult.  The more you give in, the more this gets reinforced in the child.  Stand your ground, state why the demand will not be met and walk away.

Don’t bully your child back or shout and scream back at them.  Then this escalates and becomes a spiral and a negative pattern that your interaction gets set into.  Don’t engage with the child when they are engaging in the undesirable behavior. Tell them you are ready to talk, when he/she calms down and is willing to talk reasonably.

Don’t accept or ignore disrespect.  Call out the behavior, be it disrespect or shouting or rudeness. Tell firmly that the called out behavior is unacceptable, and has to change else you won’t engage.

Set only consequences that you can follow through with. Don’t set a consequence that you will not be able to execute, if the rules or boundaries are broken. When there is no consequence the child learns that it is OK to break the rules, limits and boundaries.

Model the appropriate behavior for your child.  They learn more from observing you and imitating you than from what you tell them to do.   If you bully or compare or give in to peer pressure, your child will learn the same.

Last but not the least, remember – you are the parents and adults in this relationship. So take charge and act accordingly.  Learn to negotiate with your child on boundaries, rules etc age appropriately and help them take the bottom line of adhering to it, rather than be policed.

And yes of course, you can seek professional help, if you think you need to address some of your parenting challenges and modify your approach adaptively.

Ref:

https://psychcentral.com/blog/are-you-a-bullied-parent/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/singletons/201509/3-types-parents-who-get-bullied-their-own-children

The post Parents bullied by child – Why and how to handle? first appeared on Inner Dawn Counselling.