The reasons why most young children do not typically engage in defending behavior when they witness their peers being victimized are unclear. However, early socialization practices, such as how teachers read books depicting bullying incidents may be a contributing factor. This study involved structured video-recorded observations of 76 early childhood teachers (70 female) from 42 centers, reading two adapted books about bullying to small groups of preschool aged children who were aged between 2 years and 4 years and 11 months. The books included child and adult witnesses, intentionality and repetition of inappropriate - but developmentally typical - preschool behavior. The teachers made 9,984 comments across the two books. There were 5,662 comments that referred to the critical incidents conveyed in the stories, and these were made by all the teachers (M = 48.95; SD = 29.58). However, there were only 186 comments about bystanders, made by 42% of the teachers; and just 20 comments made by 8% of the teachers that referred to the strategies the witnesses could try, to help solve the situation. There were no statistically significant relationships between the teachers’ likelihood of discussing bullying or bystander behavior in the stories and their own experiences of child/adolescent bullying. Years of teaching experience and level of qualification were weakly correlated with comments related to critical incidents and bystanders respectively. The findings suggest defending behaviors are not typically discussed with young children; this omission could be seen as a form of silent socialization, where children are inadvertently socialized into passive bystanding behavior when witnessing bullying. Implications for bullying prevention are discussed.