Bullying among adolescents has captured the attention of researchers, educators and parents alarmed by a parade of mean girls and cyber-bullies caught in mid-punch on viral video. But such aggression may not just happen in a whirl of adolescent hormones, some in the growing anti-bully movement argue. Some older bullies were "Barbie brats" first.

Meline Kevorkian, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., researcher and public speaker on bullying, surveyed 167 educators last year and 25 percent indicated bullying occurs most in elementary schools. Research also indicates that three-quarters of 8- to 11-year-olds report they've been bullied, with more than half identifying it as a "big" problem, Kevorkian said. "It could be you wear the wrong shoes or the wrong socks. If you didn't go to the Hannah Montana concert. Your lunch smells. You can't wear certain bows in your hair," she said. "It's not that the victims are all going to grow up and shoot kids in their high school, but it's the message that making fun of people will make you popular."

I'm assuming that "researcher" Meline Kevorkian (nice name) is another one of these worthless social scientists that has her doctorate in Stuff Everybody Already Knows Studies. My question to her, or to the mom in this article who complains that her 9 year old is small for his age so he "often struggles for equal time during playground baseball and basketball games" and that "It's almost like a smaller version of an adult world that he's dealing with" is: Where the hell did you grow up? Where is this idyllic world where childhood is all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows? Where no one picks on anyone else and life is a playground where everyone shares the monkey bars equally and happily makes sure everyone gets a turn on the slide without being told? Where you become popular by being nice to everyone? I think the entire population of this paradise all grew up to be child behavior experts, because the rest of us never visited that place.

If these pedantic know-it-alls weren't so caught up in trying to make it so nothing bad ever happened to their precious little snowflakes, they'd see what the rest of us already know: that kids giving other kids crap is one of the great stabilizing influences in society. It's kids policing themselves, like fighting in the NHL. If it wasn't for bullying, kids would be showing up to school with the wrong socks and smelly lunches. If every kid with no athletic talent got to play pickup basketball, the games would suck. And if kids didn't learn at an early age that making fun of people makes you popular, blogs like Barstool would never exist.