How I have traditionally handled this in the past is (and it's not easy as a parent, but it is productive and healthy and does work):
- Explain to your child that the person saying these comments is very unhappy with themselves. Something is going on in their life and they are having a difficult time handling it so they are acting out and trying to hurt other people.
- She should feel sorry for them because they don't have the support that she has in her life right now to help them process these emotions.
- When you call the school, say almost the same thing and ask that this other child (or children) maybe get some extra attention (school counselor time) because they are obviously experiencing some hardships.
Like I said, it's not easy but this is the perfect opportunity to teach your daughter not to retaliate and while hurtful, not to get too upset because apparently the other child has it worse than her to cause them to act out like that with no self control. And since we can't control other people, you can only help your daughter in this situation and walk her through her feelings.
See, my daughter wouldn't even call them stupid cause she said "that would make me not nice and it is wrong".
I told her to tell her teachers and they told her to just ignore them. Which we all know never works with bullies.
So, I felt like this was the best option. Turned out his grandmother said he doesn't have a good home life and that his dad calls him mom thing like that all the time. Probably thinks that doing it at school makes him look cool. But even so, she said he knows it isn't right.
I guess I just felt like it was the best passive aggressive thing I could do to get it to stop.
To quote George Carlin who always said he wasn't much of a father. When he found out that his daughter's boyfriend was beating up on her, he opened the door with a baseball bat at his side. When the kid looked at the bat he said "You know, in my neighborhood where I grew up, we didn't use this for sports." (or something along those lines).
Sometimes, fear is the biggest motivator.
