Lead
"No hitting." "Nothing was taken." Once those two facts are established, the situation can become harder to name. Ignoring someone, leaving them out of a group, spreading rumors, not inviting them. None of these is physical assault, but each causes serious harm to the child on the receiving end — a pattern developmental psychology has documented repeatedly for decades.
Crick and Grotpeter's 1995 paper gave the concept a clear definition: relational aggression: harming others by manipulating relationships — through exclusion, the silent treatment, rumor-spreading, or threatening friendship withdrawal [1]. Their research demonstrated that this form of attack — using relationships as weapons — is easy to overlook, and that its psychological effects on victims can be equivalent to, or worse than, those of physical aggression. This article examines what relational aggression is, and how smartphones and social media have expanded and transformed its reach.
What Relational Aggression Is
Crick and Grotpeter's Definition
Relational aggression means using the target's relationships as the instrument of attack. Concretely: "if you play with her, you're out of our group"; deliberately excluding a specific child from group interactions; sustained, intentional ignoring; spreading damaging rumors [1].
Crick and Grotpeter's 1995 study characterized relational aggression as a form found relatively more often among girls compared to the physical aggression more commonly attributed to boys. Subsequent research has significantly qualified that framing. Card et al.'s 2008 meta-analysis found that the sex difference in relational aggression is small, and that it is a behavioral pattern observed in both boys and girls [3]. The simplified "boys fight physically, girls fight relationally" binary has been corrected by the evidence.
Long-Term Effects on Victims: Internalizing Problems
Crick and Grotpeter found that children targeted by relational aggression show significant associations with loneliness, depression, and social avoidance — what researchers call internalizing problems: emotional difficulties turned inward, such as anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal, as opposed to outward-directed behaviors like aggression [1]. Physical aggression delivers immediate harm through injury and fear. Relational aggression operates differently: it constructs the belief that "I am someone who is not accepted," and that belief erodes self-esteem gradually, over time.
The Digital Version
How Group Exclusion Now Works
The spread of smartphones and messaging apps has expanded the circuits through which relational aggression operates. Things that once could only happen at recess can now happen continuously.
The typical form of digital group exclusion is: creating a new group chat that includes everyone except the target; reading messages and not responding; talking about the excluded child within the group. The distinguishing feature of online relational aggression, compared to in-person exclusion, is that it can be conducted invisibly, out of the target's direct sight — while the target knows, or suspects, it is happening [6].
Researchers have begun describing this as "cyber-relational aggression," and evidence is accumulating that it carries psychological effects equal to or greater than face-to-face relational aggression [6].
Records That Cut Both Ways
Digital relational aggression differs from in-person aggression in one important respect: it leaves a record. For parents and schools trying to document what is happening, this can be an advantage — there is something to show.
For the child on the receiving end, however, the same record functions as a wound that can be reopened at any time. The phenomenon of "reading it again and again" — repeated re-exposure to the same harmful content — amplifies psychological damage in a way that a face-to-face interaction does not. The permanent availability of the record also complicates relationships: "you said this, you wrote that" becomes usable as ongoing leverage.
Escalation After Bedtime
In households where children have smartphones in their rooms overnight, conflicts can escalate through the night. By the time a child walks into school in the morning, they may have spent hours in the middle of a group dynamic that turned hostile — and be already exhausted before the school day starts. Vannucci et al. found that frequent social media use is associated with poorer sleep quality and higher anxiety [5]. Managing after-dark digital access is important not only in the context of relational aggression specifically but for mental health broadly.
What Parents Can Do
The Question of Checking Messages
The desire to look at a child's messages is understandable. But doing it without advance agreement risks damaging trust. The more sustainable approach is establishing, before the device is given, that parental access is a standing possibility — rather than reaching a "show me your phone" confrontation after something has already gone wrong.
Practical forms this can take: a household rule that phones stay in a common area after 9 p.m.; a parent being added to group chats the child is part of. Agreements established before a device is handed over carry less psychological cost for the child than rules imposed reactively.
Working With the School
Relational aggression tends to get worse when children are expected to resolve it on their own. Telling a child to "sort it out yourself" deepens isolation rather than resolving the dynamic.
When approaching a teacher, the framing "I've heard about a situation and would like to understand what you're observing at school" tends to open collaboration more effectively than "my child is being bullied." If the school has a counselor, that person can serve as someone the child can talk to — a trusted adult accessible within the school building.
Putting It Into Practice
When a parent suspects their child may be on the receiving end of relational aggression, the first things to do are the following.
Listen without interrupting. "But maybe there was a reason on their side?" and "have you tried reaching out more?" are not listening — they are redirecting. Let the child finish before any of that.
Help separate fact from feeling. Who did what (or didn't do)? What did that feel like? Separating these helps the child process the experience — and when the feelings are named and organized, the child is better able to think about what, if anything, they want to do next.
Take "I don't want to go to school" seriously. Stomachaches, headaches, persistent reluctance to go — these can be signs that relational aggression has reached a level that is significantly affecting the child's wellbeing. At this stage, professional consultation becomes worth considering.
Summary
Ignoring someone is not "nothing." Leaving someone out of a group is not "just kids being kids." Relational aggression is documented to erode self-esteem over time in ways that physical aggression does not, and the research base on this is substantial.
Digital environments have expanded the circuit: around the clock, with a permanent record, accessible for repeated re-reading. The same behaviors carry more psychological weight in that context.
The first thing a parent can do is treat the invisible violence as visible — to stand in front of the child and make clear that this is being taken seriously.
References
- Crick NR, Grotpeter JK. Relational aggression, gender, and social-psychological adjustment. Child Dev. 1995;66(3):710–722. doi:10.2307/1131945. PMID: 7743989
- Crick NR, Werner NE, Casas JF, et al. Childhood aggression and gender: a new look at an old problem. Nebr Symp Motiv. 1999;45:75–141. PMID: 10195839
- Card NA, Stucky BD, Sawalani GM, Little TD. Direct and indirect aggression during childhood and adolescence: a meta-analytic review of gender differences, intercorrelations, and relations to maladjustment. Child Dev. 2008;79(5):1185–1229. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2008.01184.x. PMID: 18826521
- Underwood MK. Social Aggression among Girls. New York: Guilford Press; 2003.
- Vannucci A, Ohannessian CM. Social media use and anxiety in emerging adults. J Affect Disord. 2019;207:163–166. doi:10.1016/j.jad.2016.09.039. PMID: 27773882
- Kowalski RM, Limber SP, Agatston PW. Cyberbullying: Bullying in the Digital Age. 2nd ed. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell; 2012.