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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Generally they do not know. My kids have always said that the nastiest peers were the ones very well regarded by teachers/parents- yet absolutely horrible to peers when adults were not around. Those kids totally fly under the radar while teachers/parents deal with the more low hanging fruit (kids who are not truly mean but can be inappropriate or somewhat disruptive, or have some social or academic issues to address). [/quote]

I think there are also lots of cases where one person thinks it's playing or joking or fun teasing and someone else is getting crushed.

In elementary school I was very good friends with two other kids—a boy and a girl. We were all dweebs and members in very good standing of the chess club—no one you would normally define as socially dominant. At some point in 4th grade, the other boy started teasing the girl about various things, her hair, her thick new york accent, etc. and she, being a tough and smart girl, gave it back to him pretty good. It was super funny. Sometimes I'd join in when he was doing it and she always came back with zingers to me—haha, very funny!

Then one day, her mother called my mother and said that she was sick of me relentlessly bullying her poor daughter. My mother was horrified and laid into me, I had to write an apology to her and apologize to her parents... and I was completely stunned, I had no idea what was going on! She was my friend! She teases me all the time! Plus, I reasoned, I don't say HALF the things that the other boy says! Plus, as noted by my chess club status, it was boggling to think (in my mind) that I had any sort of social influence/capital to ever punch down at anyone! I was literally the bottom of the heap! How could I bully anyone?

What was really going on was that the two of them liked each other—in the 4th grade way where they're expressing some mild form of puppy love by teasing—and even though he was saying worse things, when he said them, she didn't mind, she liked the attention. When I said them, I was just a boy saying mean things. And just because she was arguably smarter and less of a dork than me, and could snap back expertly, and just because I was, on the scale of elementary school, one of the least likely people to bully anyone, I said stuff that made her feel bad, and as unfair/unbelievable as it may have seemed to me at the time, I was saying things that made her go home and cry at night. It doesn't matter that most of the school was far harsher to the three of us than anything I did to her, I'm sure she still remembers me as the boy who ruined her fourth grade year.

I think there's a valuable lesson in that, and I tried to apply it going forward—you have to be so, so careful about what you say, you have to be so, so careful about context... something that seems like harmless play or teasing, could be felt in ways you don't understand, for reasons you don't understand, and it doesn't matter if you meant it, if you're actually a bad person, etc. 
[/quote]

SP, cont... I think my parents handled it the right way, but I don't think anyone would've pegged me as the bully, and I like to think that I learned a lesson and wasnt' ever again like that, but from her side, it was and probably still is, a classic example of bullying, and from my end it was very reasonable for noone to think it was anything bad going on.[/quote]

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