The Costs of “Kids Being Kids”: Estimating Contemporary Causal Effects of Primary and High School Age Bullying on Early Young Adult Outcomes

Abstract

This paper estimates the causal effect of childhood bullying on social, educational, and mental health outcomes using data from Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS). Prior work documents strong associations between bullying experiences and negative outcomes, yet causal findings are limited, particularly within a contemporary United States context. To address this, the paper analyzes two development windows (bullying at age 9 and at age 15) by applying an inverse probability weighted regression adjustment specification (IPWRA) to a cohort of individuals born between 1998 and 2000. The study further tests for heterogeneous effects across different bullying subtypes (physical, verbal, and social), as well as across different frequencies of victimization. For robustness covariate balance is assessed, alongside Rosenbaum bounds for sensitivity, and height is utilized as a model falsification test. We find that in the first window, bullying at age 9 impairs social capital formation meaningfully by increasing the difficulty in forming friendships during adolescence. Within the second window, bullying at age 15 increases rates of depression and lowers probability of high school completion by age 22, particularly when the bullying is experienced at higher intensities. Heterogeneous specifications find that verbal bullying in both year 9 and year 15 strongly impacts social and mental outcomes such as depression and difficulties in making friends. The paper also finds that physical bullying in year 9 increases likelihood of the individual being perceived as a bully, contributing to existing literature on bully-victim dynamics.