TL;DR: “Hurt people hurt people” contains an important truth. Children who bully may be carrying pain, insecurity, instability, or experiences of powerlessness of their own. But hurt does not fully explain bullying. Bullying involves power: the ability to control, intimidate, exclude, humiliate, or influence another person. If we want to help both the child being harmed and the child causing harm, we need compassion for what may be underneath the behavior alongside clear accountability for how power is being used.
We have all heard the phrase “hurt people, hurt people.” I have used it myself because there is truth within those four words. When a child lashes out at another child, it is worth wondering what is happening beneath the behavior. What has this child experienced? What are they feeling? What do they believe about themselves and other people? What have they learned about relationships, conflict, and power?
Years ago, when I was producing a television show, Children’s Lives Matter for Thriving Women TV, we devoted a series of episodes to bullying and power. As I recently returned to those scripts, one idea caught my attention because it went deeper than the familiar phrase about hurt people hurting people. We were talking about control.
A child who feels powerless in one part of life may discover that controlling someone else creates a temporary feeling of power. A child who feels socially uncertain may learn that excluding another child strengthens their own position within a group. A child who receives laughter after humiliating someone may discover that cruelty can bring attention, influence, or status.
Pain may be somewhere underneath that behavior. But pain and power are not the same thing. And if we want to understand bullying, I believe we need to talk about both.
Why “Hurt People Hurt People” Resonates
There is something compassionate about the phrase. It asks us to look beyond behavior and remember that a child who causes harm is still a child. That matters.
Research supports the idea that children’s environments and relationships can be associated with bullying behavior. A recent meta-analysis examining 107 studies involving more than 162,000 children and adolescents found that positive parenting was associated with lower levels of bullying perpetration and victimization, while harsh, negative, and uninvolved parenting were associated with higher levels. The relationship is complex, and parenting is certainly not the only factor involved, but children’s relational environments matter.
Understanding this gives us somewhere to begin. Instead of immediately labeling a child “a bully,” we can become curious about the child behind the behavior. What is happening in this child’s emotional world? What need are they attempting to meet? What have they learned about getting attention, belonging, respect, or control?
Those are worthwhile questions. They allow us to respond to a child rather than reducing that child to their worst behavior. Yet compassion becomes incomplete when it explains away harm. A child’s pain may help us understand why a behavior began. It does not necessarily explain why the behavior continues, nor does it remove our responsibility to protect the child on the receiving end.
Even the children doing the bullying do not fit neatly into one story. StopBullying.gov notes that some children who bully may be isolated, anxious, or struggling with low self-esteem, while others are socially connected, concerned with popularity, and drawn toward dominance. There may be hurt beneath the behavior, but hurt is not the only story.
Bullying and Power Are Closely Connected
Bullying is sometimes used as a catch-all word for almost any unpleasant interaction between children. Two children argue. Someone says something mean. Friends fall out. A child loses their temper. These experiences can certainly be painful, but they are not necessarily bullying.
The U.S. government’s StopBullying.gov definition includes something very specific: a real or perceived imbalance of power. That power might come from physical strength, popularity, access to embarrassing information, social position, or something else a child can use to control or harm another child. That distinction matters.
Researchers studying children between the ages of nine and twelve have also found evidence that bullying can function as strategic behavior aimed at obtaining or maintaining social dominance. Other research with preadolescent children describes bullying as goal-oriented aggression in which a power imbalance is used to repeatedly dominate another child. Suddenly, “hurt people hurt people” is no longer quite enough.
- A child may be hurting and seeking power.
- A child may be insecure and seeking status.
- A child may have discovered that other children laugh when someone is humiliated.
- A child may have learned that controlling who is allowed into the friendship group gives them influence.
- A child may simply have discovered that a particular behavior works.
If we look only for the wound beneath the behavior, we can miss what the child is learning from the behavior itself. If humiliating another child makes everyone at the lunch table laugh, the child doing the humiliating has learned something. Cruelty brought attention. If excluding one child from the group causes everyone else to follow along, they have learned something else. Exclusion created influence. If a threatening look is enough to make another child surrender a seat, hand over a possession, or remain silent, intimidation has produced a result.
This is where “hurt people hurt people” becomes too small an explanation for bullying. The original hurt may still be there. It may even be part of what first drove the child to reach for control. But behavior does not happen in a vacuum. Children notice what works. They notice what earns laughter, attention, compliance, status, or allegiance from their peers. When hurting another person repeatedly produces one of those rewards, bullying can become more than an expression of pain. It can become a learned way of creating power within relationships.
And the learning does not stop with the child doing the bullying. The children watching are learning too. One may laugh because joining the powerful child feels safer than challenging them. Another may become quiet because they have seen what happens to the person who speaks up. The child being targeted may begin changing the way they dress, speak, move through the hallway, or choose friends in an effort to become less visible. Before long, one child’s behavior has begun shaping the behavior of everyone around them.
When Control Becomes the Point
There is another layer to this that I think we need to consider. What may begin as a response to hurt or powerlessness can change over time. Once a child discovers that they can influence how other people behave, the sense of control itself may become rewarding.
This complicates the way we think about the child who bullies. We often go searching for the pain beneath the behavior, believing that if we can heal the hurt, the bullying will disappear with it. Sometimes that may be true. But what if the child has also discovered that being feared gives them status, that deciding who belongs gives them social influence, or that other children will change their behavior to avoid becoming a target? At that point, we are dealing with more than the feeling that may have started the behavior. We are dealing with a relationship to power that is taking shape.
I think this is where adults have an opportunity that goes far beyond stopping a particular incident. A child who has discovered the power of controlling other people needs help discovering the difference between control and personal power. They need to experience what it feels like to influence without intimidation, to lead without diminishing someone else, and to feel strong without requiring another person to feel weak.
That requires more from us than punishment. Punishment may stop a behavior in the presence of the adult imposing the consequence, but it does not necessarily change what the child believes about power. If the lesson the child takes away is simply “don’t get caught,” we have interrupted the behavior without reaching the understanding beneath it.
The more important question may be: What do we want this child to learn about what it means to be powerful?
Compassion Without Losing Sight of the Harm
It is easy to believe that compassion and accountability sit on opposite sides of this conversation. If we look deeply enough to understand the child who is bullying, are we somehow minimizing what happened to the child who was hurt? I don’t believe we are. In fact, I think real compassion asks more of us than choosing one child over the other.
The child who is bullying needs an adult willing to see beyond the behavior. That means resisting the temptation to define a child by something they have done, while still being very clear about the impact of their choices. We can be curious about what the child was feeling, what they wanted in that moment, and why controlling another person seemed like the way to get it. Then we can help them begin to understand something they may not yet be able to see for themselves: their feelings belong to them, but so does the responsibility for what they do with those feelings.
The child who has been hurt needs a different expression of our compassion. They need to know that we see what happened and that they do not have to make sense of the other child’s pain before their own pain is taken seriously. Too often, when adults understand that bullying may come from insecurity or difficulty in another child’s life, we offer that explanation to the child who was harmed: Maybe she’s jealous. Maybe things are difficult at home. Maybe he doesn’t feel good about himself. Those explanations may be accurate, but they can unintentionally ask the injured child to move toward understanding before they have even had the experience of being understood. There is time for perspective. First, there must be emotional safety.
Perhaps this is what compassion looks like when we refuse to make it sentimental. We care enough about the child who has been harmed to protect them, and we care enough about the child causing the harm to expect more from them. We do not excuse cruelty because we understand where it may have come from, nor do we decide that a child who has behaved cruelly is therefore identified as a cruel person. We stay present with both children long enough to help each of them find a different way forward.
Teaching Children a Different Experience of Power
If bullying can teach a child that power comes from controlling another person, then simply stopping the behavior leaves an important part of the lesson unfinished. We also have to help children discover what power feels like when it comes from within.
A child experiences personal power when they discover that they can be angry without allowing their anger to decide what happens next. They experience it when they can disagree without humiliating someone, set a boundary without threatening them, or walk away from a friendship that requires them to become someone they do not want to be. There is power in being able to stand apart from the group when the group is being cruel, particularly during the tween years when belonging can feel so important.
This is very different from control. Control depends upon what happens outside of us. Someone else has to move, surrender, become quiet, feel afraid, or give us what we want. Personal power asks something more difficult: can I remain connected to myself when I cannot control what another person does?
That is something children learn gradually, through experience. We can help by becoming curious about the moments they bring home to us rather than immediately deciding who was right and who was wrong. What did you want to happen? What did you feel when they said no? What choice did you make next? How do you think that choice affected the other person? What could you do differently if it happens again? These conversations help children begin to see the space between what they feel and what they choose to do with the feeling.
This balance between compassion and accountability is reflected in restorative approaches. The CDC describes effective restorative practices as combining high support with high accountability, helping children understand the impact of their actions, take responsibility, and participate in repairing harm.
Stories can offer another place to explore that space. It is one of the reasons I write about choices and consequences in The Bella Santini Chronicles. In Bella Santini in the Troll War, Bella has to encounter people whose experiences and perspectives are different from her own. Children can enter that conflict beside her and consider what happens when we react to what we think we know about another person, and what becomes possible when we become willing to understand more.
We cannot remove every power struggle from our children’s lives, nor would we want to. Friendship, conflict, disappointment, exclusion, competition, and disagreement will all give them opportunities to discover what they believe power means. What we can do is help them recognize that their strongest moments will rarely be the ones in which they managed to control someone else.
They will be the moments in which they discovered they could choose themselves.
Looking Beneath the Behavior Without Looking Away From the Harm
I still believe there is truth in the words “hurt people hurt people.” They remind us that behavior has a history, and that the child standing in front of us is always more complicated than the worst thing they have done. I want us to remain curious about that history because punishment alone cannot tell us what a child was reaching for when they chose to hurt someone else.
But understanding where behavior comes from is only the beginning. We also need to understand where it is taking the child. If bullying gives a child attention, influence, belonging, or control, then we have to help them find healthier ways to meet those needs. If another child has begun shrinking themselves in response, then ending the behavior is only part of our work. We have to help that child rediscover the parts of themselves they learned to hide.
Perhaps this is what we miss when we say “hurt people hurt people.” We focus so intently on the hurt that came before the behavior that we can fail to notice what is being created by it now.
Children are learning about power in every relationship they enter. They are learning what happens when they use it, when someone uses it against them, when they surrender it to belong, and when they discover that they can remain themselves even when someone else wants them to become smaller.
Our task is to see the hurt clearly enough to understand it, the harm clearly enough to stop it, and the child clearly enough to know that neither one has to become their story.
FAQs
Why do children bully other children?
Children may bully for many reasons. Some may be struggling with insecurity, anger, fear, or experiences that leave them feeling powerless. But bullying can also give a child something socially rewarding, such as attention, influence, status, or control. Understanding what the behavior accomplishes for the child can be just as important as understanding what may have caused it.
Is bullying really about power and control?
Power is a defining element of bullying. The imbalance may come from physical strength, popularity, social influence, access to embarrassing information, or the ability to exclude someone from a group. When a child discovers that intimidation or humiliation can change another child’s behavior, control itself can become part of the dynamic.
How can I help my child if they are being bullied?
Begin by listening before moving immediately into advice. Ask what happened, how your child felt, and what the experience has come to mean to them. Children who are bullied may begin changing themselves to avoid becoming a target, so pay attention to withdrawal, self-doubt, changes in friendships, or attempts to become less visible. Your child needs to know that another person’s behavior does not determine their worth.
Should we have compassion for a child who bullies?
Yes, but compassion does not require excusing harmful behavior. Adults can remain curious about what is happening emotionally for the child who is bullying while also protecting the child being harmed and holding clear boundaries around the behavior. Understanding why a child behaves a certain way and accepting that behavior are two different things.
How can parents teach children a healthier kind of power?
Children begin experiencing personal power when they learn that they can feel strong emotions without allowing those emotions to control their choices. They can disagree without humiliating someone, set boundaries without intimidation, and remain themselves even when peer pressure makes that difficult. Personal power comes from being able to choose how we respond rather than needing to control another person.
Recommended Reading
Why Do Two Children Experience the Same Difficult Event and Respond So Differently? — I would use this newer August article rather than the January resilience piece. It connects directly to how children interpret and internalize difficult experiences.
Your Tween Isn’t Always Lonely Because They Are Alone — excellent for the belonging, exclusion, and peer-relationship dimension.
Protecting Tweens From Social Media Takes More Than Limiting Screen Time — useful for extending the conversation into peer influence, comparison, and the emotional world surrounding tweens.
