Children certainly don’t need a parent joining them in emotional freefall – then rifling off angry letters to principals, banging down the doors of perpetrator parents or bursting into tears with a self-serving, “I know exactly what you’re going through.'
Perhaps the only competitor is finding out that your child is the perpetrator. I understand these emotions acutely and from experience.
When we zoom out on school bullying from isolated instances of it, we can see parental approaches with better success rates. These include keeping your cool, taking some notes, involving your child in the solution by talking to the school together and providing the optimism for your child that things can and will be better.
But these processes aren’t as complicated as they seem and can support all involved to understand the harm bullying causes and to be held responsible for repairing that harm.