ABSTRACT
The aim of this research was to study the prevalence of bullying in early educational settings in Finnish kindergartens. In addition, the study investigated whether bullying in kindergartens differs from school bullying and what forms bullying takes among under-school-age children. Two kinds of data were collected for the study: data from a survey of day care staff in the City of Vantaa (n = 770, involving 6910 children) and data from interviews of children, day care staff and parents (n = 114). The results of this study indicate that systematic bullying does occur among under-school-age children. The interviews showed that bullying among children under school-age appears to be a rather similar phenomenon to that of school bullying. According to our study, 12.6% of children (age three to six years) in day care were involved in bullying in one way or another. The most common form of bullying was exclusion from peer relationships. Moreover, according to our results, children in early childhood education talked about bullying as an everyday phenomenon and its content varied only slightly from adults’ speech on the topic.
