Response From Mother Of Bullied Toddler Brings Hope

Oct 30, 2017 by apost team

The overall health and wellness of our children is the primary concern for any parent. Unfortunately, the care and attention paid to this nearly sacred duty comes with a caveat—it means that when our children hurt, we feel their pain acutely. 

Bullying, no matter the reason or form it may take, often hurts our children to the core, causing them to wonder what is wrong with them inside and worse, asking a parent to explain to them what is wrong. 

This is the sort of thing that happened recently to the 3-year-old son of mother Lauren Russel. And what was the issue so egregious that complete strangers felt the need to hurt her son's feelings so deeply? The little boy was described as ugly simply because he happens to have red hair.

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As any other parent reading this might well imagine, it's an incident that tore Lauren's heart in two--so much so that she took to social media. Lauren wanted to both vent her frustrations and offer a simple plea to anyone who might read her post. It's a simple message we've heard before, that bullying finally be stopped on a larger scale that it has been in the past. Ms. Russel is asking her friends on social media to share the post to get the word out.

Lauren says that her heart "broke in two" while she was traveling on a public bus with her two children, one of whom is the ginger-haired three-year-old. She says the verbal abuser was probably not "much older than thirteen" and was very narrow-minded and cruel. Although it is not so unusual for young children to be needlessly cruel to others, Russel adds that her boy has been a target of people of varying ages. 

The verbal abuser described the boy's red hair as "disgusting," and that social services should have taken him away just because of his hair. It didn't stop there, however, as the older boy then jokingly told his friend that if he ever has a child with red hair, he would just kill it.

Russel says that her boy is too little to understand that this is simply baseless, cruel teasing without merit and that he feels very confused about himself thanks to this and many similar comments. Being a woman who has red hair herself, she writes that her heartbreak comes not only as a parent but from a place of personal understanding too.

The young boy's brother does not have red hair and often asks his mother if his hair might be changed so that it reflects a color people might "like more."

Although this saddens Lauren every time she hears it, she refuses to give up or to believe that this is simply how people are in general. She admits that part of the reason she's sharing this story, in fact, is because she believes bullies like the one on the bus are fewer than we think. She believes that the good in our world outweighs the bad and wants to use this as an opportunity to show that to her young son.

She says that there are kind and caring people who look past or celebrate physical differences and won't need to single him out. Lauren ends the heartfelt post by reminding everyone that it isn't okay to bully someone simply because of physical attributes like hair. 

Share this story to show your support for Lauren and her child and to spread the broader message that we can end bullying with enough compassion and effort!