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About Our Expert: Dr. Lee Long, EdD, LPC-S, is a trauma specialist with advanced training in evidence-based modalities including CBASP, DBT, ART, and EMDR. He’s the owner, president, and CEO of Restoration Counseling, Education And Consulting. He has nearly three decades of experience in mental health counseling.
When a child comes home from school in tears about something that happened on the playground, a parent can usually understand what happened. However, what about the cruelty that happens to preteens at 11 p.m. in a private group chat, the kind no adult ever sees? That’s the cyberbullying landscape many kids and teens are facing today, and according to Dr. Lee Long, most parents aren’t equipped for it.
Dr. Long, a psychologist who works extensively with adolescents and families, explained the gap between what parents think cyberbullying looks like and what it actually is has become one of the most urgent problems in youth mental health. I interviewed him to find out what’s changed, what the research says works, and what parents can start getting right.
The cyberbullying parents think they know — and the one that’s actually hurting kids
If you picture cyberbullying as a mean comment on someone’s public Instagram post, that’s no longer the most prevalent place it lives online. “Cyberbullying has migrated from obvious public online platforms into the far more invisible arena of private DMs, closed group chats, secondary private accounts, and even gaming environments, in spaces most parents never see,” Dr. Long said.
The cruelest modern forms, he explained, are often less about what’s said publicly and more about coordinated exclusion, social signaling, and rumors circulated in digital spaces with zero adult oversight.
Perhaps the most significant shift is something more structural: the loss of any safe harbor at home. A child who was tormented at school once got a reprieve when they walked through their front door. That boundary no longer exists. “Most parents are working with a 2010 mental model of cyberbullying,” Dr. Long said, “and until that model is updated, they’ll keep arriving late to the harm.”
‘Just words on a screen’: the misconception that does the most damage
I asked Dr. Long what misconception costs kids the most, and he didn’t hesitate. It’s the belief that cyberbullying is “just words on a screen” and therefore less real than face-to-face harm.
“This fundamentally misunderstands how the developing brain processes social threats,” he said. “The nervous system does not distinguish between a physical confrontation and a public humiliation. Both register as danger.”
The second most damaging misconception, he explained, is the advice to simply “log off”. It sounds reasonable to adults, but it misses something critical about adolescent life today. Telling a teenager to disconnect from their phone is, in many ways, telling them to stop existing socially altogether. Their entire relational world lives there. That includes their friendships, their identity, and their sense of belonging.
The psychological toll most people never see coming
Anxiety, depression, and school avoidance are the symptoms that tend to get clinical attention. However, Dr. Long said the most underrecognized effect he sees is something he calls chronic interpersonal vigilance. That’s a persistent, exhausting hyperawareness of how one is being perceived online, even when nothing overtly harmful is happening.
“It manifests as compulsive checking, difficulty being present in real-world relationships, and a social exhaustion that can look like introversion but is actually fear,” he said.
Perhaps most consequential for long-term wellbeing is what researchers describe as a loss of felt control in one’s relational world. Dr. Long explained that the erosion of a young person’s sense that their relationships are within their own power to navigate is both underdiagnosed and difficult to reverse.
Who is most at risk — and why that question may be the wrong one
According to the Pew Research Center and the National Library of Medicine, research identifies groups that face elevated risk. Young people with social anxiety, LGBTQ+ youth, neurodivergent children, and those with lower peer connectedness are all more likely to be targeted. However, Dr. Long cautioned against over-relying on a vulnerability profile.
Some adolescents are targeted specifically because of their visibility and perceived status. Cyberbullying, he argued, is often less about the victim’s vulnerability and more about the aggressor’s need for social power within a particular peer group.
Dr. Lee said that, instead of looking at what makes a particular child a target, it’s more useful to look at what’s happening in a child’s social environment that makes bullies think this bad behavior is permissible.
Why cyberbullying can hit harder than in-person bullying
Both in-person bullying and cyberbullying can cause real harm, but cyberbullying introduces a distinct set of psychological pressures. The audience can be unlimited. The evidence is permanent. A cruel post can be screenshotted and shared, and it might resurface years later in ways a hallway confrontation simply can’t.
There’s also what researchers call the disinhibition effect: people say things online they would never say face-to-face, which means the content of cyberbullying tends to be more extreme and dehumanizing than in-person cruelty. The result is a sense of being trapped without an exit. “The 24/7 inescapability and public permanence of cyberbullying creates a clear psychological burden that warrants its own clinical consideration,” cautioned Dr. Long.
What parents should do first — and what they absolutely shouldn’t
When a parent came to Dr. Long after learning their child had been cyberbullied, his first instruction was deceptively simple: listen before you react. It’s important to listen without minimizing, catastrophizing, or immediately trying to fix it because the child took a real risk in telling them.
His second piece of advice was practical: document everything. Screenshots, timestamps, and usernames should be preserved before any reporting begins, because digital evidence can disappear quickly.
What should parents emphatically not do? Contact the other child’s parents directly. “That can escalate the situation,” Dr. Long warned, “and it can strip the targeted child of their own sense of agency in resolving it.” The goal in those first conversations, he said, is for the child to feel heard and supported, not managed.
What the research says actually works (and why schools aren’t using it)
The strongest evidence, Dr. Long said, points to whole-school social-emotional learning programs, not reactive policies that kick in after harm has already occurred. The RULER framework, developed by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and built around the skills of Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions, has shown measurable reductions in aggressive peer behavior when implemented at the school level, with results supported by multiple randomized controlled trials.
The core problem? Most institutional responses to cyberbullying remain reactive. Schools wait for harm, then respond, rather than building the emotional and relational skills that make cruelty less likely in the first place. “These evidence-based frameworks exist,” Dr. Long said. “They’re simply not being utilized with the urgency the data suggests.”
What schools are getting wrong
Schools are uniquely positioned to address cyberbullying because they sit at the center of the social system where it most often originates. But most, Dr. Long said, are still operating in punishment mode rather than intervention mode.
“Suspensions and behavioral warnings rarely address the underlying social dynamics driving the aggressive behavior, and they rarely produce genuine change in the perpetrator or restore safety for the target,” Dr. Long told me.
The most effective school cultures he has observed treat cyberbullying as a whole-community relational issue that involves students, staff, and parents in building shared norms, rather than a discipline matter to be handled quietly.
“Most schools are falling short not for lack of concern, but for lack of training and organizational structure to do this kind of work well,” he added.
What healthy recovery actually looks like
Recovery, Dr. Long was careful to note, does not mean forgetting what happened or simply moving on. It looks like a young person progressively reclaiming their sense of interpersonal effectiveness and social trust.
He explained, “That process is consistently supported by three things: at least one unconditionally safe adult relationship, meaningful re-engagement with even a small peer community, and developmentally appropriate tools for processing the emotional experience.”
“The RULER framework is particularly useful here – teaching young people to accurately recognize, label, and regulate what they’re feeling is one of the most long-lasting resilience skills organizations can offer. Recovery is complete not when the incident is forgotten, but when a young person can locate themselves clearly in their relationships again – knowing who they are, independent of what others said or did to them online,” he said.
The one thing every parent of a teenager should know
If Dr. Long could tell every parent of a teenager just one thing, it’s this: cyberbullying is not primarily a technology problem. It is a relationship problem that uses technology as its weapon.
That distinction matters enormously, because it reframes what protection actually looks like. The most protective thing a parent can do isn’t monitoring software or restricting particular platforms. It’s working on the quality of the relationship they have with their own child.
“Research consistently shows that adolescents with a trusted adult they can approach without fear of judgment are meaningfully more resilient when peer cruelty occurs,” Dr. Long said. “Technology is not the danger. The real risk is a young person facing cruelty without anyone safe enough to tell.”
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The information in this article is intended for general informational purposes and reflects the views and clinical experience of the individual interviewed. It is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Parents concerned about their child’s wellbeing are encouraged to seek guidance from a qualified mental health professional. If your child is in crisis, contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, or call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
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