When Teasing Turns Toxic, What’s A Parent To Do?

The Ask Lisa Podcast does not constitute medical advice and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have concerns about your child’s well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional.

The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Reena Ninan:
An athletic eighth grader made a joke about our 13-year-old son being gay and his friend group shunned him.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This boy has called this kid something that has done a ton of damage. Kids get drunk on power. It’s kind of alarming how quickly this can happen. Bullying does have to be handled really carefully.

Reena Ninan:
How can we create communities where kids don’t do this?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think it really gets down to…

Reena Ninan:
The middle school years can be so hard.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So hard. Who would want to redo them? If somebody were like, would you like to go back to seventh grade? You’d be like, I’d rather read ground glass.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. It’s funny you say seventh grade because that I just remember seventh grade so well, and I dunno if it’s the hormones and you’re emotional.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s just a mess.

Reena Ninan:
It just is not.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Not for every kid, but oh, I don’t think anybody would go back and do it again.

Reena Ninan:
And as a mother of a son too, developmentally, you see people, especially with athletics, you see people growing in different.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
There’s a big range. I mean, there’s kids who are really big.

Reena Ninan:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Shaving. There are kids who are still looking like peanuts.

Reena Ninan:
It’s hard. It’s hard.
Well, this one goes to our middle school toolbox of what to deal with. I want to read you this letter about when teasing turns really toxic and what do you do? How do you help?
Dear Dr. Lisa, we’re struggling over here with something that happened to our 13-year-old son. He’s a seventh grader at a public school where PE is combined with eighth graders. He’s one of the smaller boys in his grade and not super athletic. Last week, an athletic eighth grader made a joke about him being gay. As a result, a rumor spread within the school that he was gay and his friend group shunned him. It died down after a few days, but there were a couple of kids who just won’t let it go. It’s all done in a joking manner. My son now has an overwhelming amount of anxiety and is super sad about his friends. He didn’t want us to go to the principal because he said it would make things worse. From what I know of the principal and the counseling center, I do not think they would handle it. Well, what should I do? How do you create a community where kids don’t do that to one another? Thank you so much.
Lisa. What is the deal with this eighth grader?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I mean, the kid already has a lot of power. He already has a lot of power. I don’t know. I don’t know. Right. I think it’s interesting. I mean, sometimes you’re like, okay, there’s some insecurity there, right? There’s something and he has found a vulnerable target and he can direct an attack at that kid, and so then he’s protected and safe and maybe that is addressing some insecurity this eighth grade boy is having. And I will say just right away, it’s so easy to just decide that that eighth grade kid is the worst kid in the world, especially if your kid is on the receiving end of this. Right?

Reena Ninan:
True.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And have a lot of feelings about that kid. I just want to say Reena, I have gotten to watch kids over very long arcs of development and I have watched kids who were frankly kind of straight up jerks in seventh and eighth grade who go on to be terrific, terrific kids.

Reena Ninan:
That’s nice to hear because you don’t feel like, especially there’s some elementary kids you see that you’re like, oh my god.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Exactly. “They’re horrible forever.”
So the first thing I just want to say because it is so hard to do, is to be like, okay, yeah, this eighth grader is completely out of line and is really abusing his power and let’s just put a pin in it that this kid could turn out to be in a year and a half, a terrific kid, and let’s not vilify him do much despite the fact, if you were the mother of the boy who wrote this, it’s

Reena Ninan:
Hard for me to separate my feelings on this one.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah.

Reena Ninan:
You give him the benefit of the doubt in this moment.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Feel really angry.

Reena Ninan:
Why do they do it? Why do you need to do it? You’re athletic. You’re king of the hill.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. Why you going after a little kid? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so one is who knows some insecurity and he was like, “Hey, hey, that kid is vulnerable and I’m going to go for it.”
The other thing I’ve seen Reena, and it’s kind of like alarming how quickly this can happen is that these are middle schoolers. They are impulsive. They just try stuff. They just do stuff. And I have seen kids who try their hand at meanness just say something kind of cutting, and I’ve seen kids of all genders do this. This isn’t just boys and they suddenly discover all this social power flows to them because, and I think you hear this dynamic unfold in this letter, all of a sudden all the other kids are like, “I don’t want to be the next one, so I’m going to get on his team and I’m going to start throwing that word around.” Everybody’s scared of him now. I’ve seen kids get, for lack of a better word, drunk on power almost by accident. And they’re like, this is amazing. Like, “If I just say, if you cut in comments here and there, no one wants to be on the wrong side.”

Reena Ninan:
So they get a taste of it and it feels really good and they keep doing it?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They keep doing it, and they don’t think that much about it.

Reena Ninan:
Okay, so for the parent here, what’s the recourse? It kind of hurt my heart that the parent here says, “I actually think the kid’s right? If I go, I don’t think they’re going to do anything.”

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, that is very unfortunate, right? We hate hearing that. I also really appreciate that so far. She’s not made an end run around the kid and been like, “No, no, no. Let me try them.”
She’s taking the kid’s input. It is hard to say though. I think it’s pretty far down the road towards what we would call bullying where there’s an imbalance in power and the kid on the receiving end is unable to defend themselves. That’s pretty much what we’re looking at here. He’s really suffering. He doesn’t feel like he can do anything as friends have iced him out. What we know from the research on bullying and bullying is what I just described, and we contrast it with conflict, which is like kids not getting along, they just are giving each other a hard time, but there’s not a sense of I’m helpless in the face of this. Bullying does have to be handled really carefully. And the reason for that is a lot of times when adults kind of go in ham handed or quickly or well-meaning they do actually make it worse. I’m trying to think through what the answer is about what this parent should do. But I am liking the restraint where she’s saying, “I actually am not confident that this is going to be handled in a very systematic, very careful way that won’t exacerbate the situation. So I’m not doing anything yet.”

Reena Ninan:
Yeah, I worry also. Okay, I know this is me, 46-year-old mom who’s seen it all right? But I really wish the friends would stand up for him. So what’s the dynamic going on there? Why can’t they just tell this kid “Nip it in the bud? No.” Or just stand by the kid if you don’t feel comfortable saying something right.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Wouldn’t that be great? No, but okay, so here’s the thing we have to do. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of a seventh grader and I mean all seventh graders. So one of the ways I’ve started to think about seventh graders is they are between the shores. So on one shore is being embedded in family life. Your family is your people you love hanging out with them over there on that other shore is adult friendship. Adult comfortable. Usually like 10th grade, 11th grade, you got your people, they’re in the water between these shores. They’re all looking for a raft to be on.
This metaphor may fall apart pretty fast. So bear with me. This kid just got pushed off the raft. He’s in the water by this eighth grader who is having, we’ll just say a very bad week. I’m just going to keep trying to have an open mind and heart about this kiddo. You can hold the hostility. I will.

Reena Ninan:
Okay, fair enough, fair enough.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll hold the love because this is someone’s child and we never want to forget that. This kid just got pushed off the raft. All his friends are looking around being like, “I don’t want to be next. I don’t want to be next. I don’t want to be the one pushed off the raft into the water, so I’m going to save myself and buddy, I hate that you are drowning, but if it’s me drowning or you drowning, I’m going with you.”

Reena Ninan:
And by the way, adults do this in the workforce as well.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They do. You will see these dynamics emerge later in life. It is very unfortunate, but I think if it works as a metaphor, I’m not actually convinced it does.

Reena Ninan:
It does actually it makes more sense to me.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
What we have to remember in seventh grade is belonging, feeling included, not feeling pushed out. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s like life or death, but it’s not too far in terms of the intensity of it for kids. Whereas we’re like, oh, you can hang out and have lunch with whoever you want. Whereas this boy and I want to get to what he called this kid. This boy has called this kid something that has done a ton of damage, all of it wildly inappropriate. And the other kids were like, “I do not want that label put on me. I will cling to this raft with this guy who’s not being nice. And I’ll watch my friend over there trying to figure out what to do.”

Reena Ninan:
I want to dig in a little bit about why he called him “gay.” Walk me through the psychology of this. Why was this word used? I like to think we’re in a different era from 25 years ago, 30 years ago when we were in school and nobody even was open about, nobody used the word gay really? Eighties and nineties. But I mean in talking small schools and whatnot, but what is happening here by using that word?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, okay, so first of all, it does not matter how progressive your community is. This is something I have learned. Boys throw this around.

Reena Ninan:
Doesn’t matter?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Doesn’t matter. You could have a family. This comes out of the mouths of boys who have gay relatives they love. It’s so interesting. I think the adults are like, what are you doing? You love your uncle and you know those aren’t our values. That does not end it. And I don’t know, I mean you’ve got a son. What have you seen in terms of how this word gets weaponized?

Reena Ninan:
I have to be honest, I haven’t heard it used. And sometimes you can overhear them gaming and talking to their friends and I really haven’t heard it used. So I’m just curious of all the words you could have said, why did you call them gay like it was such a great affront?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think it really gets down to boys are often trying to consolidate a sense of masculinity and they decide as goofball, that’s the nicest word I can think of it, middle schoolers, that somehow being gay is not such a masculine thing. And it’s also kind of hard because a kid can’t prove they’re not. There’s something very kind of teflany about it. If he calls him short, well the kid’s like, “Well, yeah, I’m short.” Or if he calls him dumb kid’s like, “Well actually, did you see what I got in my last grade?” Whatever “gay,” you call someone gay, there’s no way to prove that you’re not. And also it’s just so mean, right? And it really tells you who you’re dealing with, at least in this moment, developmentally that they’re willing to throw it around.

Reena Ninan:
Speaking of dealing with, I’m looking at letter and she says, this kid is dealing with a great amount of anxiety and is “super sad about his friends,” who wouldn’t be? How does she help him? I think in season one, an episode on anxiety and sadness where you pulled them both apart, but what’s your advice for her on that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, well first of all, empathy. Empathy. Validate. Validate. Thinking about all of our season six bumper stickers. I’m going to add another one to the pilot. “Empathy. Empathy. Validate. Validate.”
Of course he’s right. He’s scared that this is going to keep going on. He’s sad that his friends have pushed him out. And I think there’s more that can be done than this, but I think sometimes we don’t always stop on what’s helping without fixing and helping without fixing is I hear you kid, you’re having the right reaction. Of course you’re upset. Anyone in your shoes would be upset. This kid’s out of line. Your friends are not being the kinds of friends we would hope they would be. Just say the words so the kid’s like, all right, I’m not alone with this. I’m not misperceiving it. I do think the first question I would be asking if I were the mom in this, but I don’t have a son, so I want your take on this. Cause you’re living this in a very different way. I think I would be asking, “Do you have someone to sit with at lunch? Do you have someone when there’s passing periods or open periods?”
To me there is a grand canyon between this kid being like, “Well, yeah, no, I’m hanging out with this who I like from church or whatever,” that, and a kid who’s like, “No, I am taking my lunch to the bathroom so that I don’t have to sit by myself.”
So I think that that’s something I would assess for sure. What would you do?

Reena Ninan:
I don’t know. I really don’t know. And I feel like this age, teens and tweens, they don’t really open up. So you don’t really know what’s going on. That’s a great point about lunch. And maybe that is one reason I would reach out to the school to sort of see is there somebody you can monitor and tell me is he really sitting with someone? What’s going on?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
But actually on that point about reaching out to the school, so I don’t want to be like, “Yeah, well it turns out they’re bad at this, so the kid’s got to suffer.”
I think we want to think a little more. Sometimes there is somebody who’s sort of not in the formal administrative structure who you like and trust and the kid likes and trusts. And so sometimes I think’s helpful if you’re like, I’m not so sure how this is going to get handled well, if I call the principal’s office. Sometimes kids will have their fifth grade teacher or their sixth grade teacher who really knows and loves them and maybe the parent has a decent working relationship. And I would consider calling for a consult, calling that person and saying, look, you had him last year. Here’s what I’m hearing. I’m not really sure what to do and I’m not sure if I should take this to your administration. I’m not sure what to make of it. Because one thing I learned Reena, you know, I consulted to a school for 20 years and as a function of being a consultant in a school, I realized that parents don’t always interact with schools in the most helpful way, but nobody teaches you how.

Reena Ninan:
So true.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And even to the point where I realized if I hadn’t been a part of a school, I probably would’ve spoken more freely about other people’s kids. I would’ve been like, oh my God, did you hear? But as a school person, you’re like, we hate it when parents do that. We hate it when parents are up and down the path talking about other people’s kids. What I’m getting at here in kind of a long-winded way is that people inside the school can help you know what makes sense in terms of steps. They have a lot of knowledge. They may be able to say, “You know what? Actually don’t take this to the principal, but this person in the office can be trusted and they can help you handle it well.” So they can show you a route that you as a parent may not necessarily have thought of.

Reena Ninan:
I love this mom’s question where she says, “How can we create communities where kids don’t do this?” I know this sounds like a la la land. What can we do and reinforce at home that could help change our communities so we don’t have this kind of behavior?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay.

Reena Ninan:
Is there anything?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t think there’s a way to stamp it out altogether. I would love that. I would absolutely love that. If there were some magic, like, oh, we just have never done this. We should have totally tried this, it’ll totally work. I don’t think that exists. And unfortunately it is amazing to me how in really thoughtful, really empathic communities, I’m here stuff like, “the boys are playing smear the queer at recess,” so you’re just like, “Whoa,” you think we’ve created all of these environments that would make it not a thing.

Reena Ninan:
And it’s just okay for them, toss that around and

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They just don’t think much about it. I dunno if they think about it, but they’re definitely doing it. And in environments where you’re like, how could they possibly be doing this? Right. Okay, but I have an idea, and this is again, fantasy land. The more fantasy land of how we could fix all these things.
Middle school boys care what older boys think, right? So this is part of what’s the problem here is this kid has exercised a lot of power by being a big older boy. So in my fantasy universe of how we solve this is that we have ninth graders at recess and we have ninth graders and 10th graders who are super great kids, guys, who are the recess monitors or they’re in the gym class or whatever, and they hear that and they go to the eighth grader and they say, “That’s not cool. Cut it out.”

Reena Ninan:
The older boys can have great influence in the younger kids.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Tremendous influence.

Reena Ninan:
For a lot of kids. Like eighth grade also is the power year because it’s the end of middle school. Usually that school goes up until eighth. So there isn’t that older class.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
There’s not necessarily an older high school.
So sometimes in small districts or independent schools, you may have the capacity to do this, but right. I mean this is in some ways it’s just like what was the Lord of the Flies, right? In middle school can feel a little bit like Lord of the flies, right? There’s a reason why that book had the attraction that it did. But I do wonder then if there’s an adult male, the gym teacher who says to that kid, “Come over here, that’s not cool, cut it out,” right?

Reena Ninan:
Social currency.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Social currency. But I think it’s got to be a man. And I think actually it’s, “You need to knock it off,” and it’s got to come from somebody older, bigger, more power. It’s interesting. I’m like, I hate saying this. Part of me is I think everybody should say it. I mean, I think in terms of protecting the possibility that then this kid doesn’t get pushed out by his friends, that immediately there’s some sort of intervention. This is of course all my dream world. It doesn’t always happen. I think it does sometimes happen. I know it can.

Reena Ninan:
It’s good to know that the older boys, that there’s this respect and how do you get that dynamic mixed in somehow where there’s sports or,

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, I think there are actually lots of older boys who would just do this automatically because they get past that age and then they’re just like, this is wrong. We shouldn’t do it. I also think in my fantasy land of how I would change all of this. You could have designated school leaders or guys who are in charge of this and they are given instruction and training and their job is to interrupt this when they see it, and to get younger boys to cut it out.

Reena Ninan:
I just still feel I can’t let go of the fact that this kid is hurting. It really bothers me. And when you’ve got that social dynamic that’s not good at school, it bleeds into everything because school is everything. That’s eight hours a day. So what’s your advice for the parent who’s struggling and this kid who probably feels like there’s no way out of this, and if it’s a school district that’s not that big, you’re going to continue on high school. How do you get the kid to see past this when it’s so painful and you’re really sad and

Dr. Lisa Damour:
There’s no easy solutions? And it’s not like she can be like, well, we’ll just do this and magically it’s fixed. Okay, so there’s a couple things worth trying. Maybe placing a call to a trusted person, seeing what the deal is, see if something can change, confirming that this kid’s got some company somewhere. I think that especially in these moments, and I think you’re getting at this for this kid, this feels like this is my new life. This is forever. It’s just going to be this way. I am stuck with this. And what we do know is, no, this is so crummy and it’s really painful right now. And your friends will evolve and grow. And often if this eighth grader continues down this line, if he keeps doing this ninth, tenth grade, that actually starts to be problematic. The kids stop putting up with it as much.
There may be some consequences for this kid, but they’re maybe a year or two away or even more. The job I think of adults in these moments is to say, “I know this feels horrible, horrible right now. Here are all the things I’ve thought of that we could do to fix it. Can you think of anything else to fix it? But it’s not always going to be this way. And I think there’s a good chance that over time either that boy will grow up and knock it off or his friends will help him knock it off because this is totally unacceptable behavior.”

Reena Ninan:
It’s hard. It’s just so hard. And there’s so many dynamics at play at middle school, and especially with boys and seeing it firsthand. I just did not realize how different boys develop some very quickly middle school, others not for a very long time. And how that dynamic of how big you are, how small you are, affects your social currency.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Tremendously.

Reena Ninan:
Tremendously.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And I always think, and I wrote about this in “Untangled” a million years ago, I saw this New Yorker cartoon and it’s two people walking up the steps of Capitol Hill, two men each with a briefcase and one of them saying to the other, “How do you know you have power if you don’t abuse it?”
And I’ve always thought, that is the seventh grade. That is the seventh grade. They are concrete. They do not think, should I do this? Is this a good idea to do this? They’re like, check it out. I say this one word at this kid, and everybody falls in line and wants to be my friend and is doing my bedding.

Reena Ninan:
What a great cartoon that really sums it up.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Really gets it. It really gets.

Reena Ninan:
It breaks the heart of the matter. So Lisa, what do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, I just want to give the science on something you are observing, which is when you hit puberty is a really different factor in terms of outcomes for girls and boys. So traditionally, we’ve always seen it when we look at the data that hitting puberty early as a girl is not necessarily connected to good outcomes. That you don’t necessarily want to be the fifth grade or sixth grader with the woman’s body and you can see why it’s a lot to handle. And then all of a sudden, sometimes you’re dealing with all sorts of stuff that no kid should have to deal with in terms of how people are reacting to you. But the flip is true for boys. Early puberty is associated with better outcomes for boys because of the athletics, because of the social currency that comes with it. Adults tend to treat them like they’re older and they often sort of step up to that in a good way. So there’s nothing to be done about this. Puberty is going to do what it’s going to do and your kid’s on their clock, but you’re observing it that when your kid hits puberty early is for all intents and purposes, when we look at the outcomes, much easier on boys than girls.

Reena Ninan:
Well, thank you for walking us through this because I think some aspect of this, whether they call them gay or fat or there’s just something that runs true in this age group, so I appreciate you talking us through this.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, I wish it were different.

Reena Ninan:
I do too. I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.