How to Protect Your Child from Bullies

The last thing Dr. John Knight expected to hear when his wife called him at the office was that their son Jonathan, a “popular” 12-year-old, had been punched in the nose by a boy at school.

Knight was even more alarmed to learn Jonathan had been teased repeatedly for several days and even “rednecked,” a term used by children to describe the act of hitting someone on the back of the neck.


“I was enraged that this could happen,” says Knight, a developmental behavioral pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Boston. “I felt powerless and mad that it had gone on for a couple of days and no one had intervened.”


When a child is bullied, parents are frustrated, angry, even frantic. They ask: why is my child the scapegoat? How can I stop the bullying?


Bullying – when one child or several repeatedly tease, taunt, threaten and physically abuse another child – occurs in every school to children of all ages. A 1993 survey of 16,000 students in grades 9-12 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, found that 16 percent had been in a fight at school the previous year.


Bullying cuts across all socio-economic classes, occurring in cities as well as suburbs, according to a 1991 Massachusetts study conducted by Harvard Community Health Plan Foundation’s Pediatric and Adolescent Violence Prevention Project. The study investigated intentional injuries among 200 children, ages 3-18.


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