Children as young as three are bullying their peers at childcare, a study has found, challenging a common belief that children that young are not capable of deliberate victimisation.
The Macquarie University study, presented at the National Centre Against Bullying conference in Melbourne on Thursday, found 93 per cent of early childhood educators believed young children between the ages of three and five years were capable of bullying.
Researcher Cathrine Neilsen-Hewett said, in addition to name calling and pushing, young children are engaging in more sophisticated bullying typically associated with older kids, such as alienation and exclusion.
“There’s a tendency to not really want to label children as bullies or to think young children are capable of deliberate acts of aggression towards other children,” Dr Neilsen-Hewett said.
As a result, she said, there is often a reluctance to acknowledge bullying, instead describing it as disobedience and dismissing it as a normal part of childhood.
But research suggests about 20 per cent of children aged three to five are engaged in victimisation, either as a bully or a target.
“We’re finding that the children engaging in those bullying behaviours tend to have higher social cognitive skills, so they have what we call a more developed theory of mind, which means they have a better understanding that others have thoughts and feelings that are different to their own,” Dr Neilsen-Hewett, now an academic at the University of Wollongong, said. “Because of that, we’re seeing that they’re actually able to engage in these quite deliberate behaviours.”
The survey of almost 200 early childhood educators found only one in five of the participating centres had a specific anti-bullying policy, with most indicating bullying was addressed within other policies and not usually termed "bullying".
Nesha O’Neil, the president of Child Care New South Wales, disagreed with labelling young children as bullies but emphasised the importance of addressing poor behaviour.
“It’s not something to be brushed off and ignored. It absolutely has to be addressed every single time but it doesn’t necessarily have to be labelled as bullying,” she said.
“Bullying tends to be systematic, aggressive, planned, malicious attacks. Three- to five-year-olds are just not capable of that. They don’t sit at home at night and plan maliciously how they’re going to repeatedly attack a child.”
