When I told a friend that in my family we do a lot of teasing, he was aghast. He never teased his children, he explained. He viewed teasing as mean, bordering on bullying. It had no place in family life, he said with a tinge of anger.

In fact, I had never experienced teasing in my own family as a child. School and the street, however, were another matter. Here I remember teasing that was hurtful, the kind that made fun of me through derision. It was malicious, its point being to make me feel humiliated. I imagined that this was what my friend had in mind when he ruled out teasing his own children and put a stop to it when he saw his daughters engaging in it with one another.

At its most benign, teasing begins in childhood when adults play peek-a-boo with infants. The negative aspects of teasing increase with a child’s age, from mean and hurtful to symbolic. One study found that “the dominant motivation for the child doing the teasing seemed at every age to be sadistic pleasure in the discomfort of the child being teased, although one sees some playful, benign teasing by late adolescence,” writes Dr. T. R. Warm of the Department of Pediatrics........

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