Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.
This familiar childhood saying expresses an idea about harm that research has taken quite seriously over the years.

When considering children’s aggression, researchers have usually focused on physical aggression rather than the impact of name-calling or excluding kids from social cliques or other forms of what is termed “relational aggression".

And because boys tend to go in for the physical variety while girls are more likely to be relationally aggressive, past studies have given shorter shrift to girls’ experiences.

Nicki Crick, a specialist on childhood aggression at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues at the University of Buffalo and Washington State University recently conducted a study to help redress the research bias towards boys and physical aggression.

Her team at The Crick Social Development Lab followed four groups of children in a Midwestern US city over the course of a year (from third to fourth grade). The groups included children assessed by their peers as being relationally aggressive, physically aggressive, relationally plus physically aggressive, and non-aggressive.

Just as much as those who are physically abusive to their peers, they found that children who are relationally abusive are at risk for future social–psychological adjustment problems. They also found that the most troubled kids – and the kids whose problems were most likely to escalate during the year – were those who were both relationally and physically aggressive.

Crick and her colleagues also note other research which shows that being the victim of gossip, exclusion, or name-calling can be stressful for children, particularly for girls.

The authors point to the contrast between their findings and popular beliefs that girls mostly experience “benign childhoods". Relational aggression might be harder for adults to see, but, like tussles with sticks and stones, it often serves as a warning of more problems to come.

• Summary of ‘A Longitudinal Study of Relational Aggression, Physical Aggression, and Children's Social–Psychological Adjustment” by Nicki R. Crick, Jamie M. Ostrov and Nicole E. Werner in Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Volume 34, Issue 2, 2006, pp131-142.