The classroom gets blamed first. The home shaped it long before that.
This piece is a follow-up to the wave of bullying cases making headlines across the country recently, including the recent school stabbing incident. Rather than revisit the details of any single case, this article looks at a question that rarely gets asked: what actually shapes a child into someone who bullies in the first place?
The question rarely gets asked out loud, but it should. Every time a bullying case makes headlines, the conversation almost always centres on the victim, understandably so. What gets skipped is the harder, less comfortable question underneath it. The honest answer is rarely simple, and it is almost never "the child was just born bad."
The Numbers Behind Malaysia's Bullying Problem
Bullying in Malaysian schools has been climbing steadily. The Ministry of Education recorded 8,820 bullying cases in secondary schools nationwide in 2023, a nearly 20% increase from 7,360 cases the year before. By October 2024, 11,594 students were involved in 5,703 reported cases spanning physical, verbal, social, and cyberbullying.
Those numbers point to something important: bullying is not a rare, isolated character flaw confined to a handful of troubled kids. It is widespread enough that understanding its roots matters for an enormous number of Malaysian families, not just the ones directly involved in any single incident.
The Family Environment Shapes Behaviour More Than We Admit
Decades of psychological research converge on a consistent finding: children who bully are frequently shaped by what happens at home long before they ever set foot in a classroom.
A prospective study following over a thousand children from before birth found that fathers' harsh disciplinary practices and hostility during preschool years were meaningfully associated with children's bullying behaviour years later in elementary school. A broader meta-analysis covering childhood and adolescence found that low parental warmth, hostility, and inconsistent discipline confer real, measurable risk across every role in the bullying dynamic, not just the bully, but the victim and the bully-victim as well.
This is not an excuse for the behaviour. It is an explanation, and the distinction matters enormously if the goal is actually reducing bullying rather than simply punishing it after the damage is done.
Attachment, Not Just Discipline
Psychologists point to attachment theory as one of the clearest explanatory frameworks here. Children who develop insecure bonds with their caregivers, whether through neglect, inconsistency, or outright hostility, tend to internalise a hostile working model of relationships generally. That internal model does not stay contained within the home. It travels with the child into school, into friendships, into every peer interaction where trust and safety are meant to exist.
Related research on emotional security describes a similar mechanism from a different angle: chronic conflict between parents erodes a child's felt sense of safety, which in turn produces defensive patterns, vigilance, aggression, or withdrawal, that spill directly into how that child treats peers. A child who has learned at home that aggression is how conflict gets resolved, or that emotional needs go unmet regardless of how loudly they are expressed, often carries that exact script into the school playground.
Violence Witnessed Becomes Violence Repeated
One of the more sobering findings across this research is the intergenerational transmission of violence. Children exposed to family violence, whether directed at them or simply witnessed between parents, show measurably higher risk of becoming aggressors themselves later in life. Watching aggression modelled as a normal way to handle frustration or conflict teaches, often without any explicit lesson ever being spoken aloud, that this is simply how problems get solved.
This is precisely why bullying prevention that focuses purely on school-level discipline, suspensions, detentions, stricter rules, tends to have limited long-term impact on its own. If a child returns each evening to the exact environment that shaped the aggressive behaviour in the first place, the school-based intervention is treating a symptom while leaving the actual source completely untouched.
What This Actually Means for Parents
None of this research suggests every bully comes from an abusive household, or that every child from a difficult home becomes a bully. Individual temperament, peer influence, and school culture all play meaningful roles too. But the family environment consistently emerges as one of the strongest, most underexamined predictors available, and it is also, encouragingly, one of the most within a parent's power to actually change.
Warmth, consistency, and calm conflict resolution at home are protective factors, not just against a child becoming a victim, but against a child becoming an aggressor as well. Teaching a child how to sit with frustration, name it, and resolve it without aggression is not a soft parenting nicety. It is one of the most concrete, evidence-backed things a parent can actually do to reduce the odds their child ever becomes either side of a bullying incident.
Closing Thought
Bullying will always demand accountability for the behaviour itself, and victims deserve protection and support without qualification. But if Malaysia genuinely wants bullying numbers to stop climbing rather than simply reacting to each new headline, the conversation needs to extend further back than the school gate. It needs to reach into the living rooms and dinner tables where a child's very first lessons about conflict, respect, and aggression are quietly being taught, long before any teacher or counsellor ever gets the chance to intervene.
Kamarul Azwan (k.azwan@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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