Why many children and teens inherently cruel?

In My Humble Opinion
21

“Inherently” is its own reason. I don’t think children and teens are inherently cruel, I think they are cruel for reasons other than “it’s their nature”.

I agree with this and disagree with the folks saying either that human nature is just like that or that children haven’t developed morally enough yet.

There’s a term for what jtur88 alludes to: horizontal oppression. I was a children’s libber when I was a child. The oppression of children is complex and different from a simple black & white analysis of power, as it involves care and protection and it’s obviously oversimplistic to view it in terms of evil mean grownups exploiting children for their own advantage. But children are kept artificially disempowered and treated as lesser entities in ways that they experience as a social inequality.

And we resent it, even if we don’t always analyze it in terms of “children’s rights” so much as “fucking teachers and my damn mom and dad” etc etc. And that anger and resentment bursts out sideways, encouraging coercion and bullying and tormenting and belittling (study that word, please) of other kids.

It reaches its apex when children are the most aware of it yet not as of yet receiving many of the benefits of being perceived as “almost adults”: middle school, or what we used to call junior high. (& yeah, the tensions of new hormones sure don’t help).

22

I was in the third or fourth when a bully took a particular dislike to me.

23

Here are my thoughts:

Young children (like under 3-4) are kind of sociopathic because they haven’t developed that far yet. You see a big change as they grow up.

Then they’re relatively chill for a long time- they can be mean to each other, but it’s still somewhat low level stuff.

Come about junior high/middle school and puberty kicks in, and the inherent gender behaviors start kicking in. So for boys that age, there’s a huge drive to hammer out a social/dominance hierarchy, and it’s mostly done by figuring out who can pick on who, and who can’t- it’s too common for me to believe that this isn’t some sort of caveman throwback behavior. This naturally (IMO) leads to some kids being picked on by everyone, and some being picked on by very few or nobody at all.

I’m not sure exactly how it works with girls, but something similar seems to happen at about the same age. Where it all sometimes goes off the rails is when the adults in charge of all this don’t handle it very well.

Then, once they’re more mature, things calm down again; you rarely hear of college or adult bullies (I’m sure they exist, but are far more rare). I don’t know if it’s maturity, separation from the pre-existing social order, or having settled into their particular role in the hierarchy though.

24

This is what I believe. Only I think it’s a little more complex. I think that teens are jostling for social standing in their clan. We evolved from animals that lived in small, relatively stable societies, and probably, the social status you achieved as a teen carried through to some extent the rest of your life. So young teens compete fiercely for status against each other. Sexual and otherwise.

This behavior is not at all adaptive today, when most of us move out of our middle school social group as adults. But we are still programmed to cut down our middle school rivals.

(And I’d like to add another vote for toddlers showing empathy. My son was obviously empathetic and tried to help others before he could walk.)

25

I always wrote it off to evolution and the whole survival of the fittest thing. Until we get old enough for socialization to break that chain or at least conceal it better.

26

I donno. Velocity said:

Which is a classical argument from many religions. Hence he requirement for that religion. I’ve heard it countless times. If Velocity comes back, maybe we an get a clarification.

That argument that human nature is evil isn’t satisfying to me,because it doesn’t explain why we aren’t all bullies.

I do think that some bullies are made from poor parenting.

27

Human are social, or pack animals. Children have only one milieu, and no escape, generally, since they tend to go to neighborhood schools, and they are less complex than adults, so the alpha child tends to have the best social skills, and everyone wants to be friends with the alpha. The betas are the bullies. If they had better social skills, they’d be alphas, worse, and they wouldn’t even be betas. They very jealously guard their position, and keep the gammas in their place. The gammas are the outer tier on the popular circle, and pick on everyone else, to make sure everyone else knows they’re on the outside. Sometimes the outsiders, to shore up their own self-esteem, make a special project of picking on one particular child, who is the bottom of the barrel (excuse my mixed metaphor). Having that one really down child makes the outsiders, and probably the gammas too, feel better about not being on top, because at least they’re not on bottom either.

When you are an adult, you have many milieux. You are going to be on top someplace, even if it’s being the vice-president of the local Coin Collectors’ club. And because everyone has some place that can shore up their ego, they are less invested in putting down other people. There may be cliques at work, but they don’t usually exist just for the purpose of excluding someone else, and you usually can find someone to eat lunch with. If you find yourself in a harsh environment where you are on the bottom-- you try to get into a gaming group, and no one will let you build a character-- the keep killing you off while you are getting started, and won’t let you use a character you developed with a different group-- you can leave, something a child can’t do, with the rare exceptions of the ones whose parents can send them to private school.

As for the bully kids who really seemed to enjoy it, and weren’t just protecting their social position-- you can’t do it to adults who have the option of leaving. Or in some circumstances reporting them to HR.

Which is another point. Adult bullies are people who are guilty of things like workplace harassment. HR tends to believe the victim, and come down harshly on the harasser. Conversely, in school, victims of bullying are often told to try harder to get along with their bully.

And then, nature has made the age of 11-18 a difficult time emotionally, even if you are one of the alpha kids. Bullying hurts more acutely. Harassment at work, or other types of adult bullying are easier to see as the bully being an asshole.

TL;DR kids are not adults. too many differences in adult and child/teen world for fair comparison.

28

Adults are mean and cruel too. What holds them back is fear of consequence. Few people want to get punched in the face, written up for harrassment, socially rejected, or kicked out of the club (literally or metaphorically). Mean and cruel people don’t get too far in life unless they already have a lot of money and power or they have exceptional talents.

Kids are simply more disinhibited.

I don’t think humans are naturally evil. Every society seems to develop a code of conduct that deternines what’s proper behavior, so obviously humans aren’t amoral wildebeasts. But it doesn’t matter what the code is, some significant fraction will always defy it. And it will always take kids awhile to learn it, because no one is born knowing all the rules.

29

My thoughts as well, monstro.

30

Girls are more likely to play mind games, or get boys involved in things they can’t do (rape threats, that kind of thing - yes, they do that. Ask me how I know this.)

Adult bullies definitely exist, and while they’re less likely to be physical (unless alcohol and drugs are involved), they can definitely ruin lives and careers if they find the right people and place to do their thing. Never mind that the consequences are potentially greater as an adult; the ones who don’t get their butts kicked immediately can find themselves in positions of great power.

31

I agree with the poster who said at least some of it goes back to that pack mentality about rooting out the weak, or if not the weak the different in any case. I’ve seen where an adult will have a hard time telling a kid that is high functioning autistic from a “normal” kid, whereas a group of kids in a classroom will pick up on that something is different about this kid in less than a minute, children are very observant of differences and different people are scary. There really a lot of different reasons why children are cruel.

Myself personally, I was very shy and timid, in elementary school, after my parents got divorced I became a bully to a lot of my peers and didn’t back down from conflict, but the truth was I was hurting inside and I wanted to lash outwardly and hurt others, by high school I mostly chilled out and stopped trying to bully others.

32

A whole bunch of different reasons.

Empathy (like every other trait and skill) comes more naturally to some people than to others, and develops at different rates in different kids. And even in the kids where it develops early, it’s a simplified, specific form at first. My three-year-old has felt empathy for years, but that’s in situations where she empathises with the kid who just bonked his head on the table because *she *would hurt if she hit her head. She’s only just starting to figure out that empathy is needed even in situations where you wouldn’t be bothered by something but the other person is - that you can empathise with the emotion even if not with the specific situation. And that takes a bit of teaching. (‘Why is Jane scared of the spider? I’m not scared of spiders. That one can’t hurt you.’ ‘Yeah, but you know how you were scared of that weird-looking puppet at the show, even though it couldn’t hurt you? That’s how she feels.’)

Understanding of consequences also takes a while to develop, and develops at different rates - and it needs to be taught. If a kid’s parents aren’t teaching the kid that there are consequences for cruelty, then the kid won’t learn it.

And there’s modelling. A kid who routinely sees cruelty at home is likely to think it’s standard behaviour. A kid who rarely sees it is much less likely to think that.

So if you’ve got a kid to whom empathy doesn’t come naturally, who isn’t being taught empathy, who isn’t being taught that there are consequences for cruelty, and who’s seeing it being modelled as acceptable behaviour every day, you’re gonna have a cruel kid.

Throw in the jockeying for social position, and some hormonal chaos on top of it, and things get nasty.

33

True, but outside of the… hardcore(?) bullies, there are a lot of, for lack of a better term, “mid-level” bullies who aren’t necessarily the apex bullies, but are just normal kids trying to hammer out their place in the hierarchy. These kids rarely end up as lifelong bullies.

Bullies do exist, but IMO, they’re far more rare as adults; you’re more liable to run across sociopathic types who just don’t give a shit about you in the least bit, and who will screw you/take your credit/etc… without a second thought. Running into someone who actually tries to dominate you like a bully is extremely rare as an adult. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but it’s rare, for the reasons you mentioned. As adults, when someone larger physically assaults a smaller one repeatedly, there’s a non-trivial chance that smaller person will equalize that situation via law enforcement, firearms, etc… There’s a lot more recourse as adults than as a kid.

34

Thanks for posting this link!

35

My brother and his wife have some friends whose son was diagnosed with Asperger’s as a preschooler; they have said, “He seems perfectly normal to me, but then again, I don’t live with him.” Their kids enjoy hanging out with him too, when the family comes to visit.

I used to have to deal with kids making fun of me in public who had never seen me before in their lives, and I never had any interaction with them except walking by them. :mad: That was really hard to explain to my parents, who thought I was doing this to embarrass them. :smack:

36

I’m typically one to wax socio-philosophical like most of the other responders here.
However, on this one I’m going to try a different approach:

Yeah, that’s because the media needs to publish stories. Your average run-of-the-mill “The kids all went out during recess and got along together and nobody was injured or even sad about losing a game.” just isn’t sensational enough to make much of a news item.

And now, in the Information Age, you can get news stories from Epkin Elementary School (Kyrgystan) right there on your web browser in Arborfield (Saskatchewan, Canada) and the stuff that’s outrageous and sensational will stick in your mind a lot better than those life-is-just-spiffy stories.

–G!
Move along, people; there’s nothing to see here.
No, really, there’s nothing to see!

37

Most of the kids I knew who were mean as kids grew up with some issues as adults. They had it under control but the underlying issues would still come out. I have seen empathy in 3 year olds. Some of my earliest memories as a child involve feeling empathy for another child when I saw them exposed to something they shouldn’t have been exposed to. Usually a rage aholic parent.

38

I can’t really back that. Humans are simply animals. We may be more advanced than other animals, but at the end of the day, we’re still animals. And if you watch any group of social animals, they’re always sizing each other up, trying to determine pecking order. This is done by doing things that we consider cruel, but only because we can put words to it. Children, especially young children, don’t have that full concept of what cruelty is.

As far as #1, that can be disproven by watching livestock. The young of livestock are often separated from the parents and bottle fed, so they have no contact with the parent. I’m not talking factory farming, either, but in a lot of modern hobby and small farming, too. So the young are taken care of well, but they do not have the adults to ‘control/dominate’ them, yet the young will start demonstrating the exact same behavior the adults to, challenging with headbutting, humping others to assert dominance, or vying for prime position in feeding. With #2, peer pressure will have some to do with it, but it’s more because of the desire to not be the bottom of the pecking order than the just fitting in.

39

Frontal lobe is not fully developed. While empathy comes naturally for some, others have to learn empathy.

40

This:

Is true, I believe, of children like this:

There’s a level of cruelty that is a sign of damage, usually of abuse. I wouldn’t lump that in with the “inherent cruelty” phenomenon, though. Even children raised right, in loving homes, will inevitably have a moment or two (or three) of being a total jerk. Those incidents - the low key shoving for a spot in line (literally), or the day we all decide that Jimmy is an icky nosepicker and don’t let him catch the ball - that’s so universal as to be unnewsworthy, too.