Reply to I got an email telling me my daughter is a mean girl.

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Reply to "I got an email telling me my daughter is a mean girl. "

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I would be curious to find out, from those of you who think the email is creepy or stalkerish, what you think a tween or teen who was being bullied, gossiped about, unnecessarily excluded, teased, etc., should do to make that behavior stop?

Because the problem is that kids in that situation often have very few options. Teachers/administrators will often refuse to do anything or get involved unless a child is committing or threatening physical violence. So spreading a nasty rumor about how Larla is "weird" because of the way she dresses or because she just moved or doesn't have the right clothes or doesn't conform in some other way? This will be treated as a non-issue and someone complaining about it will be told to simply stay away from the perpetrators and "make other friends." But if the people doing it have a lot of social status and are vicious, which sometimes they are, they will escalate and Larla will become a pariah for no good reason. Social media might become involved, including finsta accounts that adults don't know about and can't see. The behavior will be carefully calibrated to ensure the perpetrators have plausible deniability?

Parents might not care either, and since kids are more likely to become targeted if they appear weak or nonconformist in other ways, it's often the case that victims of this kind of relational bullying have parents who might be abusive or absent, which is part of what marks them as a target to begin with.

There's no other place to appeal. If you met the perpetrators mom in passing or got the sense that they might be horrified to discover how their child was behaving, I don't think it's weird or creepy or stalkerish to try appealing to that person. I think it's desperate, but I think these situations can be desperate.[/quote]

There are a few options here. If this email came from a child — and from the wording I absolutely do not think it does, [b]I think it is a boundary-transgressive and inappropriate adult[/b] — the child needs to go to a school counselor first. If it is an adult, then it needs to be non-anonymous to have further conversation.

I would never, ever engage with an anonymous email like this. It is shocking to me that anyone thinks it is appropriate, to be honest. [/quote]

+1, and if OP’s kid is 17, then did a crazy mom really send this email on behalf of her 16 or 17-year-old teenager? Bizarre.[/quote]

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