Five Instances In Which Your Child Wasn't Bullied

The event every parent dreads; your child comes home from school and reports that he or she has been bullied.
Schools nowadays are much more proactive against bullying, and rightfully so as seemingly minor bullying incidents can lead to major safety incidents later.
The increased attention has actually opened up a proverbial can of worms at schools, as many of the incidents being reporting are not actual bullying cases.

Learn the signs, the dangers, and what to do about it: 1.
The incident your child is describing happened a long time ago and apparently happened only the one time.

As an elementary school principal, the first thing I often do when a child reports that he or she was bullied is ask the child to start from the beginning and tell me everything he or she can remember about the incident.

When the alleged victim can't provide those details because so much time has passed, I begin to suspect something else is going on besides a routine bullying event. Sometimes the child has just heard a bully-free public service message and remembers an incident from a long time ago.
In elementary school discipline, this is called a cold case and often there's not much that can be done.

Talk your child through the incident and come up with a plan for what could be done if it ever happened again. 2.

Your child can't recall a specific time, place, or culprit.

Even a young child can describe if the event happened before lunch or after lunch, on the playground or on the school bus. Parents may be unwittingly fueling students' cravings to report bullying by putting too much emphasis on the issue at home.

Believe it or not, some students report bullying issues because they think that's what their parents want them to do, whether or not a bullying incident has actually occurred.
Of course, we never want to ignore a student who reports bullying, but when the child's story has unraveled in the face of proof-positive evidence that it didn't happen-which is sometimes the case-the parents should act quickly to make sure the child knows that creating stories is not the right thing to do.

3.
The child your child says bullied him is much younger.

This is another red flag that your child has confused bullying with something else.
Of course this doesn't mean that younger children don't ever bully older children, but in true bullying there is ALWAYS an imbalance of power in favor of the bully.

Sometimes the older child uses the word bully to describe a child who is irritating, obnoxious, or hyperactive. 4.
The child your child says bullied him has a significant disability. Believe it or not, some children are quick to identify a student with a severe disability such as a mental impairment or a seizure disorder with being a bully.
The reason is that children may have the background knowledge necessary to understand how a child could behave differently from other children. The closest word they possess in their understanding is the word "bully.
" Again, this is the time to have a very important conversation or series of conversations about people who suffer from disabilities. If the child with the disability is causing harm or is otherwise making your child feel uncomfortable, then it's time to talk with the teacher about how to better support all of the children, including the one with the disability, to succeed in the classroom.

5.
Your child was in close proximity to the teacher and the incident went unnoticed.
One parent years ago complained to me that a bully had put play dough in her son's ear on the playground.

Upon investigating the incident, I found that the teacher in the class doesn't ever use play dough, that the woman's son was within feet of the teacher assistant on the playground the entire time, and that he never ever reported being hurt in any way.

Furthermore, the alleged bully was a shy child who had never been a problem before.

I had to consider the possibility that the child had been bullied but the incident had slipped under the radar; however it's just as likely that nothing happened at all.
Similarly, children often bump into each other by accident.
I can't say enough that we take all bullying claims seriously, and investigate and take necessary actions and precautions.

However, we must also consider that sometime kids exaggerate and sometimes parents rush to conclusions.
It's all about looking for patterns of behavior, extreme events, and considering all logical possibilities before drawing a conclusion.