Prof. Jane Ballis

Bully bully or not?

Should I be worried about bullying if my son is not? Some close family friends have a daughter who picks on my son. If it were most people we would just limit the amount of time they would have to be together and it would pretty much solve the problem, but in this case our families are very linked and it would be very sad if we couldn’t all get together like we have for a lot of years. Their 9 year old daughter, however, seems to love to pick on my 6 year old son. It’s never physical but she teases him and tries to make him feel and look stupid and tries to exclude him when others are over – just out of a kind of meanness I think. Her parents, who are great people, seem to have a blind spot about their daughter’s behaviors and let her get away with, in my opinion, far too much. In any case, we do not ever let the two of them hang out together unless we are there to kind of supervise things (although this is hard because she likes to play in the room with her door locked from adults). If we aren’t in the house kind of as a mediating presence the bullying is much worse and he has complained about it in the past when we left him in their care for an afternoon or for a few hours. The thing is, it doesn’t really bother my son at all. He is really easy going and good natured and he doesn’t seem to notice half of what she tries to do and most of the other half doesn’t seem to bug him very much. He thinks she is a lot of fun and he just likes to play with her. It drives me crazy that he won’t stand up to her more…. So is bullying a problem if it does not cause any emotional pain for the bully victim? How do I get my son to be more assertive towards her?