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The excitement and joy of leaving your home country behind is often short-lived. Once it dwindles, what is left behind is uncertainty and emotional hurdles. Therefore, soon after shifting, parents’ focus quickly shifts from their children to securing a job and understanding their new reality.
Since parents are so fixated on overcoming their own challenges, immigrant children are often neglected. But truth be told, children from immigrant families struggle too. They not only have to adjust to the new school environment, but also deal with their feelings of isolation.
As a result, rather than having a community to rely on, many of these children are left vulnerable and become an easy target for bullies. In fact, research indicates that 27.53% of immigrant students have been insulted or laughed at in school, while 17.93% have been hit, kicked, or pushed by other students (Source 1). But why them?
Reasons for Bullying
Here are a few reasons why immigrant students are more susceptible to bullying than their native counterparts:
- Cultural Differences
70% of immigrants in schools feel isolated and discriminated against because of cultural differences and language barriers (Source 2). Since these students come from other countries that have different cultures with varying religious beliefs, races, customs, and traditions, they can have a hard time adjusting.
Not only that, native students also tend to be biased towards immigrant students due to differing views on what is “normal” and can perceive them as outsiders.
To make matters worse, language barriers are quite common. Immigrant students and their native fellows often have difficulty communicating with each other. Moreover, they also fail to participate during class or develop any camaraderie with their fellows. What, therefore, starts as misinterpretations quickly devolves into mockery and bullying.
- Social Isolation
Social isolation is also a common experience for most immigrant students. When these students first move out of their native country, they also leave behind their community and friends. Therefore, they have to start anew in different schools, which is easier said than done.
The biggest hurdle they face is that their appearance, race, etc, tend to be different from their fellows. Since the native students do not consider that normal, the immigrant student is alienated and excluded from interactions. Therefore, social isolation makes those students vulnerable and easy prey for bullies.
- Stereotyping
Students and teachers at times make harmful assumptions about immigrant students based on their nationality, accent, religion, or values, which gives way to a hostile environment. These assumptions are a result of cultural biases and characteristics wrongfully attributed to a particular ethnicity. For example, people frequently believe that immigrants are unhygienic and have lower intelligence.
However, some biases that are harmless fun for class fellows can result in serious self-esteem issues and a deep sense of not belonging in the targeted student. Moreover, bullies can take this as their chance to bully the immigrant.
- Limited Family Support
Many immigrant students also have little to no family support when it comes to bullying. In such cases, quite frequently, the problem at hand is not parents’ lack of care but rather their lack of awareness and unfamiliarity with the school system. It is possible that they do not know a lot about bullying and its prevention.
As a result, parents can fail to deal with bullying. In some other cases, they might ignore the child’s complaints and focus only on their academics. Parents may also not pay attention to their child if they, too, are struggling. All in all, the lack of support makes children more vulnerable to bullying.
How to Protect from Bullying
Here is what to do to protect your immigrant child from bullying:
- Encourage Open Communication
Your children might feel hesitant to talk to you about bullying because they either feel indebted to you or they might deem it culturally inappropriate to discuss sensitive topics with you. Therefore, the responsibility to protect your child by creating an environment that offers open and honest communication falls on you.
To do so, you must allocate a specific time of the day to talk to your child about their daily life. Moreover, during discussions, you must set aside any judgments, listen actively, and ask open-ended questions to keep the conversation going. These follow-up questions can be about anyone making your child uncomfortable or about particular bad social experiences they want to talk about.
Not only that, but you must also make it abundantly clear to your child that no issue is too small and that they have your unconditional support. All in all, with you showing genuine interest in the child’s life and not being judgmental, it is more likely that your child would open up about any instances of bullying.
- Stay Involved In School
Active involvement of parents in a child’s school life can protect them from bullying, too. However, for this to work out, you must take time to attend your child’s school meetings and keep in touch with their teachers. If you make yourself visible in the school, the school staff and students will better understand the kind of support your child has at home.
Moreover, if you end up creating good relationships with their teachers, you can get regular updates on your child’s performance and social behavior. Therefore, through active involvement, you can identify any red flags in your child’s behavior early on and offer them the support they need.
However, above all, you must encourage your child to go to a guidance counselor since they can be a good source of help and emotional support for students being bullied.
- Help Them Build Confidence
The equation of bullying changes when the bullied has confidence because it means they are more likely to retaliate or report it. Therefore, if you succeed in improving your child’s self-esteem, it can not only decrease their chances of getting bullied but also increase their appreciation for their cultural background. Rather than feeling embarrassed about being different, you must instill a sense of pride in your child regarding their traditions and identity.
One way to do this is by joining a community where families of similar background can make your child feel belonged. Moreover, you must proactively teach your child about the different forms of bullying, like verbal, physical, social, and cyber. As a result of them being aware, they will better recognize unacceptable behavior and will be less likely to deal with it silently.
- Use A Phone Monitoring Application
Regardless of all the measures taken, you can never be too sure whether your child is opening up to you about being bullied. If you have come to an impasse, you might use the Xnspy app. The primary goal of this app is to provide parents with the complete phone activity of their children.
Therefore, you, as a user, can monitor your child’s digital environment for any instances of bullying since technology has enabled school bullies to extend their abuse to online spaces, too. Moreover, even if they are not getting bullied online, your child’s conversations and other online activities can provide you with crucial insight into whether they are getting bullied.
To facilitate remote and discreet activity logs, the Xnspy phone monitoring application only requires you to access your child’s phone once. After you have installed the app on their phone, you will get real-time updates on their activity through the app’s web dashboard remotely.
All in all, the features that allow you to keep tabs on your child’s activity and catch bullying early on include SIM activity monitoring, social media monitoring, internet search history, alerts, etc.
In SIM activity, you can check your child’s contacts, text messages, call logs, and even listen to their call recordings. On the other hand, for social media logs, Xnspy accesses messages over 13 apps and also uses its screen recorder to take periodic screenshots of your child’s complete phone activity every 5-10 seconds.
Moreover, parents can see their child’s internet and search history through the app’s keylogger or receive instant alerts for flagged contacts and words.
- Display Positive Social Behavior At Home
Lastly, your child can better learn how to handle bullying by observing the behavior of those closest to them, like you. If you successfully model empathetic and assertive behavior at home, your child will gradually become better at interacting with others and responding to instances of bullying.
Moreover, it falls upon you to teach your child conflict resolution in a calm and composed manner without becoming aggressive. Not only that, they should also know how to empathetically listen to varying viewpoints and disagree respectfully.
With you modeling these ideal behaviors, your child can develop better social skills and will stand up for themselves when situations call for it. Therefore, they will not be trampled by social pressure or be non-confrontational in front of a bully.
Overall, our discussion has made it abundantly clear that bullying is a serious concern, and immigrant children are 5.35 times more susceptible to experiencing one or more forms of bullying compared to their native peers (Source 3). As a result, you must address the issue promptly through open discussions, confidence-building, active involvement, phone monitoring application, etc.
Sources
1.Gil Flores, Javier, and José Clares-López. “Bullying in Students Belonging to Immigrant Families in Primary Schools.” 2014. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 132: 621–625. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.04.372.
2. Maynard, Brandy R., Michael G. Vaughn, Christopher P. Salas-Wright, and Shanna Vaughn. 2016. “Bullying Victimization Among School-Aged Immigrant Youth in the United States.” Journal of Adolescent Health 58 (3): 337–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2015.11.013.
3. Abdusamatov, Khasanboy, Dinara Babajanova, Dilshodjon Egamberdiev, Yunus Xodjiyev, Uktamjon Tukhtaev, Nodirbek Yusupov, and Sitora Shoislomova. 2025. “Challenges Faced by Migrant Students in Education: A Comprehensive Analysis of Legal, Psychological, and Economic Barriers”. Qubahan Academic Journal 4 (4):330-60. https://doi.org/10.48161/qaj.v4n4a1209.
