Little Boy Bully

Posted by Lorren on August 6, 2008

When my daughter was 2, I got a job at Kindercare. Most of the kids were really great, and my daughter generally had a good time. Except for a short period of time when she shared a classroom with a bully. A 2-year old bully.

We would feed the children breakfast every morning. They would get plenty to eat. If they wanted more, they could have more. But this little boy didn’t want his own cereal. He wanted to take the cereal from the other kids.

He was pretty intimidating, I suppose, if you were also 2. He’d hit the other kids. He hit my daughter. He bothered her so much that my daughter became a completely different girl. Where once she had enjoyed going to Kindercare with me, she started to cry when we went to work. One day we were getting her bath water ready and she started crying, and she was still upset because of that little boy. So I turned in my resignation. They convinced me to stay on part-time, but they were normally kept in separate classrooms after that point.

Eventually, the little boy was kicked out of the school because he began to get the habit of opening the door and running outside by himself despite it being against the rules. I was not all that sad. Even a year after he left, my little girl would remember the boy as being the boy that hit her.

My little boy has recently started developing bad habits that could turn into bully habits. He and his sister were playing a game the other day where they would push each other onto the couch. If it ended there, that would be fine, since our couch is pretty soft, the game is relatively safe, and both kids were enjoying it. But he decided to take the game to his Sunday school classroom and would push the little girls there. He’s 4 days younger than one of the little girls, and a few months older than the other little girl, but he’s a lot stronger than the little girls. So the game is not acceptable there.

So he’s been spending a great deal of time sitting down in a chair for being naughty, which he doesn’t like one bit. Now he’s started to get the idea that he can’t get away with pushing the girls, so he’s starting to walk into them and push them that way. Also not acceptable. I was in the nursery with them this morning and I caught him trying to take a toy away from one of the girls as well.

If left undisciplined, my little boy could turn out just like that one little boy that my daughter dreaded being around so much. I’m hoping that with a little consistency, I can teach him to treat the other kids nicely and not push them around. I don’t want my little boy growing up to be Little Boy Bully.