At the start of every school year, parents in Bucharest make their lists: backpacks, textbooks, uniforms, after-school schedules. But beyond the material inventory lies a fear that’s harder to put on paper – bullying.

A recent study shows that for almost half of parents in the capital, bullying is the number one concern. Above costs, above traffic, even above teaching quality. And it’s not hard to see why: the phenomenon has long since moved beyond being an unpleasant incident and become a constant feature of school life.

In big cities, especially in Bucharest, group dynamics are amplified. Overcrowded classrooms, overstretched teachers, and relentless academic pressure create a context in which harassment finds room to grow. It’s not simply about “tough kids” picking on the “weaker ones.” It’s about how groups operate when there isn’t enough attention, supervision, or emotional education.

The forms of bullying have shifted. If once it was about nicknames or shouted jokes in hallways, today much of the violence has moved online – into messages, group chats, and posts. A child no longer escapes peer pressure when they get home; sometimes the phone is where the abuse continues quietly, unseen by adults.

For parents, the greatest worry isn’t only the visible conflicts. What troubles them most is the silence: the child who withdraws, who no longer shares stories, who invents excuses not to go to school. In a city where stress is already high, parents feel that the risks of anxiety, depression, or social isolation are real and hard to counteract.

Schools have begun introducing regulations, awareness campaigns, and class meetings dedicated to the issue. But the general perception is that these measures are fragmented and insufficient. There’s a wide gap between what is written in policy documents and what actually happens in a noisy classroom where one teacher must manage teaching, discipline, and peer relationships all at once.

In Bucharest, independent initiatives have sprung up – NGOs, counseling hotlines, emotional education workshops – but they function like islands. Without a clear national framework, their impact is limited. Parents have started seeking their own solutions: therapy for children, support groups, conversations with other families. Yet this only deepens the divide between those who can afford such resources and those who cannot.

Bullying in Bucharest schools is a symptom of deeper issues: overcrowded classes, lack of school counselors, the absence of real emotional education in the curriculum. And it’s a symptom that hurts, because it doesn’t show only in statistics, but in the eyes of children walking to school with their stomachs in knots.

At the start of the year, parents post pictures of brand-new backpacks on social media. But behind the festive images, many are thinking about something else: how to protect their children from meanness, exclusion, humiliation. It’s a worry that overshadows the excitement of new beginnings and repeats itself every September.

That’s why bullying is no longer just a “children’s problem,” but a question of trust in the school system. As long as parents feel there are no clear, effective mechanisms of protection, fear will dominate the conversation around the first day of school.

And perhaps this is the strongest signal: in a city where parents learn to live with lack of parking spaces, with traffic jams, and with overbooked schedules, the one thing they cannot accept is the thought that their child might suffer in silence, in the very place where they should feel safest.