Parents have often asserted themselves as the main authority for their children. However, the assumptions about their children are flawed in multiple ways. The most important flaw may be seen in the fact that parents often mistakenly associate their children with bullying-related incidents. This results in parents failing to realize if their children are the bullies or the ones being bullied.

According to social psychologist Debra Pepler of York University in Toronto, an expert on bullying prevention, “children very seldom tell their parents either that they bully or are being victimized. It’s a very shameful experience to be victimized by peers, and there are a variety of reasons children don’t tell their teachers or their parents. Some of that has to do with thinking the parents or the teachers are going to make it worse.”

In the early 1990s, Pepler studied a group of aggressive students who needed work on social skills and compared them with another group of students of the same age, gender, and ethnic mix as the aggressive students who were socially competent. The two groups bullied each other at the same rate. “Since that study, a lot of research has shown there are different types of children who are bullies,” Pepler says, “and even highly socially skilled children become more popular when they bully. So it doesn’t surprise me that some parents think that their child could never bully.” Being victimized or bullying probably is the consequence of parents seeing their children in an overly positive light or even denying the existence of a problem. Dangerous assumptions like these may exacerbate the problem of bullying. When parents assume their child is not being bullied or bullies others based on their child’s happiness, the problem may be exacerbated.

Although bullying is a serious problem, there is no denying that it is an immensely complex social dilemma. It continues to persist despite being labeled as a social stigma, mainly due to race, gender, rumors, as well as other social issues. However, one thing is clear, bullying can be mitigated by parents who are willing to view their children as they are. The key is for parents to not look at their children in an overly positive light and to not deny the issue as a whole, if their children do indeed face this problem.