Big Bad Bully

How kids—and parents—can wrestle with a bully. Eventually, the one most hurt by bullying is the bully himself.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on September 01, 1995 - last reviewed on October 10, 2009

Aw, C'mon—Isn't It Just Boys Being Boys?

Sure lots of boys engage in all kinds of competition and rough-and-tumble play; those are non-threatening physical ways of establishing dominance hierarchies, a goal that actually promotes social stability.

But the line between fun and fisticuffs gets erased only when there's a bully in the pack; the bully may misconstrue some borderline gesture or movement as intentionally hostile. When push turns to shove, when meanness intrudes on play—when someone selects a target and inflicts pain and the payoff is someone else's humiliation—then it's outright bullying.

And that's not a healthy way of interacting, not for the victims, but especially not for the bullies. There are huge costs to them. It is the first and perhaps most identifiable stop on a trajectory that leads almost directly to criminal behavior. Bullying is just another word for antisocial behavior, and it's part of a more general rule-breaking stance. According to long-term studies conducted by Olweus, 60 percent of boys who were named as bullies in grades six to nine have at least one court conviction by age 24.

Kids who are aggressive in childhood tend to be aggressive in adolescence and later. In a decades-long look at boys in London, those who were bullies at age 14 were largely bullies at age 18—and at 32. In a classic long-term study that is still ongoing, University of Michigan psychologist Leonard Eron, Ph.D., and colleagues have been following 518 children in upstate New York from the age of eight. All are now in their 40s. The most astonishing finding is that the kids who were named by their peers—at age eight—as most aggressive commit more crimes, and more serious crimes, as adults. They have more driving offenses. More court convictions. More alcoholism. More antisocial personality disorder. More use of mental health services.

When young, says Eron, these kids have intelligence levels equal to those of their normal peers. But by age 19, aggressive behavior gets in the way of developing intellectual skills. At age 30, they and their spouses were interviewed. "There is significantly more abusive behavior," says Eron, who's girding for another round of assessment. "They don't achieve socially, economically, or professionally. They never learned prosocial behavior, and that interferes with every activity." Their work histories are erratic, at best—the behaviors that make them troublesome among peers make them disruptive among co-workers. The longer the haul, the more the bully suffers.

"Parents should be concerned about bullying," Eton adds. "These kids are not just harming others; they're harming themselves."

"Over time, aggression is a marker of every negative outcome that there is," adds Vanderbilt's Schwartz. Bullies get locked into patterns of aggressive and hostile response that are very rewarding to them—but that sharply circumscribe who they get to hang out with. As they go through high school, increasingly their behavior is acceptable only to others like themselves; fortified with their hostile cognitive style and growing contempt for the values of others, they spin their way to outcast lifestyle.

There's sex, drugs, and booze to keep them busy—and they take up with all of them earlier than most other kids, studies show. They drop out of school, hang out with aggressive peers, and that drives further deviance; the link with others like them may be what turns a bully into a criminal. However criminals are made, the point can not be clearer—bullies' social style drives their downward drift through life.

If bullying is bad for those who give it as well as those who get it, then just exactly why do kids do it? "It's a great strategy for getting what you want," says Illinois's Gary Ladd. You push the little girl off the tricycle, you get the tricycle. "A lot of aggressive kids think aggression works. They think about one outcome, but not about the others."

People do have a need to control their environment, and perhaps some enter life with differences in that need, as occurs with other traits. The great psychological benefit to bullying, says Ladd, is that bullies feel powerful, in control. "They've picked a little microcosm in which to exert control." But it's a helluva way to get your own way.

"These kids are experts at using short-term payoffs," says psychologist Gerald R. Patterson, Ph.D., a founder of the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene, and a pioneer in family studies of aggression. "They're not very good at long-range things that are in their best interest."

For all those boys who engage in bullying as a way of gaining status, the last laugh is on them. Their trophy is a sham. What looks like power and status turns out not to be that at all. The proof is in their testosterone levels.

Richard E. Tremblay, Ph.D., is a psychologist at the University of Montreal who has been conducting long-term studies of over a thousand bullies and other aggressive kids. Among one group of 178 kids that has passed the threshold of adolescence, Tremblay checked out hormone-behavior links by measuring the boys's levels of testosterone. What he found set him on his ear. The boys who were rated (by peers and teachers) most physically aggressive at ages six to 12 had lower testosterone levels at age 13 than ordinary peers. The "multiproblem fighters," or hothead bullies, proved to have the lowest testosterone levels of all.