Through the years, individuals reach a stage of life called middle and late childhood. In this stage, children witness physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development that is most familiar in this phase. As a matter of fact, in this stage of their life span bullying is the most common among children between the ages of six to 12. Bullying is often a serious and sensitive topic that affects children in many forms, such as, physical and emotional.
As mentioned in the article, ‘Links Between Social Information Processing in Middle Childhood and Involvement in Bullying’, “bullying is a negative, intentional behavior (physical, verbal or psychological harassment) displayed by children towards their peers. It is repeated over time and implies an imbalance of power” (Camodeca et al., 2003, p.116). Intimidation tends to involve three different groups of students: bullies, victims, and bystanders. Also, there exist several types of bullies, the most common is the aggressive bully, then the passive bully, and finally the bully-victim. These types of bullies differ from each other due to their unique characteristics. For example, the aggressive bully is always seen in typical situations, they tend to be physically strong, fearless, and confident. Unlike the aggressive bully, the passive bully often is seen as a more insecure individual, they have low self-esteem and live an unhappy life at home. The last type of bully, the bully-victim, is often rarely seen in a typical bullying situation. This type of bully is most likely to witness intimidation themselves and do this out of anger and revenge. Furthermore, some of the consequences of being bullied by another peer often lead to poor academic performance, depression, anxiety, and suicide. The book ‘Life-Span Development’ by John W. Santrock states that “bullied children reported more loneliness and difficulty in making friends, while those who did the bullying were more likely to have low grades and to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol” (p.322). Overall, bullying can be present in a physical situation, socially, verbally, and/or through cyberbullying. These four types of intimidations are the most commonly seen. Santrock also mentions that “boys are more likely to be bullies than girls…” (p.322). In a future bullying circumstance, we do not have to disregard who and how it will affect children in their middle and late childhood stage.
Nowadays bullying has been an immense problem around the world. It manifests the most in schools, where children have more interaction with other children. According to Dennis & Satcher (1999), “As universal experience, 15% to 20% of children will be victimized by bullies during their school years” (pg.76). However, during the middle/late childhood stage where children are between six to 12 years of age, they have a high probability to experience bullying due to the cognitive and social development they are going through. According to Smith, Madsen & Moody (2006), “younger children have not yet been socialized into understanding that you should not bully others” (p.267). Children during middle and late childhood do not have the same understanding and have not yet developed the social skills to prevent and deal with it.
Bullying in the middle/late childhood stage where children attend elementary and middle school usually affects both genders equally, what makes it different is that each gender experience different types of bullying. Boys tend to experience name-calling and sometimes even physical aggression whereas girls get bullied most of the time by name-calling (Dennis & Satcher,1999, p.76). Even though bullying affects equally to both genders it can also develop from other things such as racial discrimination, clothing, or appearance.
Children who are the victims of bullying tend to be the ones who do not look like the majority. According to Dennis and Satcher (1999), “other researchers have found that racial minority children report being called names more frequently than racial majority children” (p.79). This same concept applies to children that wear different types of clothes or are different in appearances such as their weight or height.
The consequences that bullying brings during middle and late childhood are far beyond physical. As mentioned before, bullying is also verbal, social, physical, and cyber. The different characteristics developed during middle and late childhood because of bullying are all physical, cognitive and socioemotional.
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