Mom of 3 POV: When Your Kid Hits My Kid

Being a parent is full of awkward interactions and situations. Like when you’ve been chatting with another mom for ten minutes before realizing you have no idea which child even belongs to her. Or when your toddler loudly asks why that daddy’s boobies are so big at the holiday potluck. But when there’s conflict between your kid and another kid, things can feel especially uncomfortable.

A few weeks ago, I received a call from my oldest son’s teacher. “He’s fine!” she assured me right away, but she wanted to let me know there had been an incident at school—he’d been hit by a classmate. The details were murky (my son came off the bus with an ice pack but otherwise seemed totally fine), and I felt good about the school’s response. Still, I’ll admit I was half expecting the other parent to reach out and yet…nothing.

If it was the other way around, we would reach out to the parents right? I asked my husband. Or would we? What is the appropriate response when your kid gets hit?

And then I remembered that I’d actually been on the other side of this situation two years ago when my son (the same one) had pushed a classmate. Again, the teacher called, explained how they were helping him learn to ask for space more appropriately, and I felt good about that too. I debated reaching out to the other parent…but ultimately decided not to.

In both instances, I turned to my mom friends for advice. Many could relate: the colleague whose 7-year-old’s “best friend” was also kind of a bully. The friend who worried that her daughter’s new pal was a bad influence (“I knew it was bad when she said she no longer liked Taylor Swift because Georgia hates Taylor Swift”). The neighbor who’d been confronted at preschool drop-off about her 3-year-old’s biting. But when it came to what to actually do—whether to text, apologize, say nothing, involve the teacher—no one really seemed to know.

Parenting today can often feel like navigating a minefield of gray areas, and this might be the grayest of all: the social etiquette of what to do when your kid is involved in a conflict. Because on the one hand, I want to protect my child (I mean, the teacher told me that the kid had given my son a black eye!). But on the other hand, I want to give everyone grace (my son had been the aggressor before after all). Then there’s the argument that kids need to learn how to work things out on their own. My advice? Assume good intentions from the other side.

So yeah, maybe there’s no one right move—just a shared understanding that we’re all trying to raise good humans while figuring out the rules as we go. I guess ultimately parents are figuring out how to play nice, right there along with our offspring.