Were you unkind at school?

[Sunshinescramble]

For those that were bullies or unkind at school, do you feel remorseful as an adult? Do you question why you did it?

I dont think I was a bully at school but i did say some mean things to a friend about her appearance on a few occasions. (Around age 12/13). 32 years after leaving school i still feel an incredible amount of guilt. We were never not friends and never fell out over it but I still feel incredibly awful.

I'm not sure if I was just trying to fit in at school and act like the "cool kids". I feel an idiot even just typing that. I came from an unloving, uncaring family with no morals. I guess I was just influenced by the people around me. It's not an excuse I know. I desperately wanted to be a part of the friendship group but never really fit in. I think they saw me as the odd one out and I retaliated. (I once heard them laughing about the clothes I was wearing , we couldn't afford to shop at trendy shops)

I was on the receiving end of name calling too. One girl used to call me a really horrible name throughout school to humiliate me so I knew how it felt.

I've raised my children to be good kids and be respectful of others. I've never subjected anyone to anything unkind since. I think people would describe me as a good person.

I'm no longer in contact with this girl but part of me wants to contact her and apologise. Would this be weird after so long?

Surely over the course of school life there were situations when you were kind, situations where you were unkind. Situations when people were kind to you, others where people were cruel to you.

I very much doubt that anyone was unkind for the whole of their school career.

I was bullied badly and won't forgive them, even decades later

People that were mean though, on occasion, I can forgive, as everyone is capable of being mean or saying a throwaway unkind comment

I've definitely said some mean things but I do regret them and anyone I've hurt. But I've never bullied anyone.

I wasnt a bully but I was a judgemental, spoilt cow. I regret alot of things I said to my school mates.

I was bullied badly, and in return i was very unkind. Because why bother being nice, when its the arseholes who rule the world...
I do have remorse that i was quite a cowy to some people who didn't deserve it. If i'd meet them today - i would apologise.
But my biggest regret that i never fought back when bullied. Because somebody really deserved a brick in the face.

I just feel so terrible that I could have caused someone to be upset or offended, even after all these years. I can handle being on the receiving end of name calling, I'm quite tough.

I was a bit unkind at times, as was my group of mates at school. We were the popular ones.
We never went really far though, deep down we weren't bad kids and never wanted to hurt people. At times, we may have been cruel but mostly to our mates, rather than to outsiders.

My school was also really good for that, we had many lectures in assembly.
Even the smallest of incidents was taken seriously.
And, its worth saying, it was in a pre-internet era

I have witnessed bullying though. And in hindsight, I wish I spoke up against it.

For me this lasted way beyond school! I think I’m a nice person now … But then I sometimes look back and cringe.

I was bullied, and I was a bully as well. I didn't learn better at home and I feel shame, even though I don't know how much of this shame should me mine.

To be honest, most of the bullies at my school were in hindsight very troubled girls, who were in all probability being groomed and subjected to sexual abuse and coercion.

I can still remember a girl I was terrified of to be honest (with good reason - the whole family were prone to huge public fights - and they had Rottweilers which were intimidating to say the least) but seeing her through adult eyes and not a thirteen year old girls eyes I can see that she was probably living in hell in that house. Not that there was much I could do: it was before safeguarding was a Thing and an extension of friendship would have probably seen me beaten up! But it does mean I pity her rather than hate her as an adult.

Maybe it’s different if your bully was a ‘mean girl’ type.

I saw the name a woman who I was at school with pop up on Facebook recently. She was offering a service (cleaning type thing) and my first thought was that there was no way on this earth I would let her anywhere near my house as she was such a deeply unpleasant person at school. The effects last a lifetime.

Yes I was definitely unkind at times.

I think all children will sometimes say something unkind, deliberately. It's part of testing boundaries, testing cause and effect. It can feel like a little bit of power over someone else which children rarely have otherwise. As teenagers this can be ramped up with all the pressures of working out how to fit into a complex society.

I think it's a normal part of development. Almost everyone grows up to be generally nice, kind, thoughtful and polite.

I do feel bad about some of the things I said as a kid, yes, but it was part of me learning how to be a decent adult, I think.

I was quite a kind girl. I was also moderately popular, and that involved a bit of bitchy bonding. There's only one girl I feel bad about - she was socially awkward, gawky and unkempt. With adult eyes, it seems likely she wasn't being well parented. I'm very sorry I sniggered about her personal hygiene, crappy hair, etc, and excluded her from groups.

There wasn't any serious peer bullying in my year but I wish we'd had the nous to realise this girl needed to be lifted up and we could've helped a little.

Such cognitive dissonance here. Being mean and unkind, especially deliberately is not a normal part of development.

It is, absolutely. It may not be palatable but it’s part of finding out who you are and where you belong in the world.

I was mean at times. I was incredibly unhappy , badly treated, and neglected .
I looked an absolute mess, unkempt, ill fitting unfashionable clothes, I imagine I smelled, I was always hungry and we moved around a lot. I was bullied intensively until we settled in my current town.
I became pretty but my hair and clothes were still atrocious. I made friends, not the mainstream cool kids but school was my ‘safe place’ at last and I thought I had to be funny all the time, sometimes my funny was pure mean, picking on people who were as badly or worse off than me for laughs.
I found out years later I had adhd, none of my teachers were surprised!
I was not mean all the time but I feel bad about it to this day no and I know I’m still remembered by many as a bitch.
id be devastated if I found out my kids behaved like I did.
i show my kids I love them every day and if I ever hear a suggestion they even turned a blind eye, let alone are mean, I challenge them.
I don’t believe there’s necessarily bad kids, I think there’s poor parenting, poor teaching, misdiagnosed kids and that kids can become bad people for a number of reasons.

I was absolutely disgustingly hateful. I bullied a lot of people and I was generally unpleasant constantly.

My mother was severely abusing me emotionally 90% of the time and physically 10% of the time. She would constantly pick out girls at school that she ‘liked better’ and go on and on and on about them and they were the ones i then bullied (i was age 6-12) after this age I realised it wasn’t ok . She was also a childminder and made it clear she preferred those children to me and was excessively kind to them and gave them treats so i was then horribly unkind to them as well. It was horrific. I was so desperately unhappy and manipulated and behaved awfully. It only stopped by chance at 12 when I picked on a girl older than me and she happened to one day see my mum screaming at me in the park and threatening me and the next time I started trying to bully her she just said to me ‘shall we be friends instead?’ (But then I became unhealthily obsessed with her as it was the first time I felt liked and cared about)

edited to add I was diagnosed with ASD at 14 and I do often think this made things worse as I was so confused growing up

Actually it is. There is plenty of research into it.

The only unkind thing I did was paint a lassie's nails with Tippex - and she let me do it because I told her it would dry clear and shiny.

There was also a feud between a friend of mine and a love rival, and it ended up involving all the friends of each girl too. I remember one day we were walking home and they ran after us to call us names, so I shouted at them, "I hope you all go bald!" I was 16 at the time - my attempts at intimidation were pretty crap.

I feel awful as well as the things I said and did were so nasty as I was replicating what an adult was saying and doing to me so I know I caused a lot of harm and hurt in those years and I feel awful still

Same here. I'd hate to think what I'd said affected her anyway in life. I'd rather suffer bullying every day myself than inflict horribleness on someone else.

Yeah it would be really weird.

I've seen a lot of people I went to school with upset because their kids are now getting bullied and I just think - karma.

I wasn't a bully. In fact I was often the one being picked on. But I was unkind for a period of time. There was a girl I disliked and another I didn't dislike, but who irritated me, and I used to draw caricatures of them with really exaggerated features and show them to others. I wasn't even any good at art. People generally knew who they were when they saw the drawings. Some laughed, others told me I was a bitch. I think they were right. But it was extremely out of character for me to behave like this. I was generally quiet and sensible and maybe a bit odd. The only thing I can think of is that I was hanging about with someone I hadn't previously been friends with and our sense of humour seemed to revolve around ripping the piss out of all and sundry. Even though the girls themselves didn't see what I drew, I still feel absolutely awful about it, particularly as one of them is a genuinely lovely person. Maybe I was jealous. Probably.

I was bullied horrendously and I'll never, ever forgive those who made my life hell all the way through secondary school. I'm 38 now and still suffer mental health issues due to this.

There's no excuse to be like that at all, I won't have it.

It’s an uncomfortable truth, but research supports the idea that almost everyone who was bullied also engaged in bullying behaviour at some point. School is a complex social environment where power dynamics constantly shift, and many children who experience unkindness end up replicating it—whether as a defence mechanism, a way to fit in, or simply because they don’t yet have the emotional tools to respond differently.

The idea that bullying is confined to a select group of ‘bad’ kids doesn’t align with what we know about childhood development and social behaviour. Studies show that most children engage in pro-social and anti-social behaviour at different points in their school lives. It’s not about excusing it, but understanding that bullying is often cyclical—those who suffer from it frequently pass it on.

This isn’t to say that every child who was bullied became a full-fledged ‘bully’ in return, but most, at some stage, were unkind to someone else. That’s school. And that’s human nature. The real difference lies in whether, as adults, we recognise it, learn from it, and ensure our children do better.

Even though they may have only been 12/13 at the time you now think their own children deserve the same?

I was name called way more than i ever gave out but I wouldn't want the people who did that to me to suffer later in life because of it.
Ultimately they were just kids, trying to find their place in school and influenced by the people around them.