Parents Don’t (Always) Know Their Children Have Been Bullied: Child-Parent Discrepancy on Bullying and Family-Level Profile of Communication Standards

Abstract

Discrepancy between bullied victims' experience and their parents' understanding indicates underutilization of family support system, and thus presents an important risk factor. An online survey (N = 300 child-father-mother triads) was conducted to establish a framework that helps distinguish families with different child-parent discrepancy levels. This family-level variability was modeled by profiling child-father-mother triad's family communication standard (FCS) orientations. This ''FCS profile'' indeed distinguished families with different levels of discrepancies. Further, SEM analyses revealed that those discrepancies presented a distinct risk factor vis-à-vis effects of bullying reports per se. Finally, FCS profile had an indirect association with victims' well-being via mediation by child-parent discrepancy. These findings are discussed with regard to the role of family communication in bullied individuals' coping processes.

Testing a Mediational Model of Bullied Victims' Evaluation of Received Support and Post-Bullying Adaptation: A Japan-U.S. Cross-Cultural Comparison

“…In fact, recent findings suggest that relational and interactional factors make significant differences in individuals' management of difficult information, in general, and bullied victims' disclosure and coping, in particular. For example, Matsunaga (2009) found that communicative dispositions of family were related to parents' understanding of bullying; parents of the families with an open and affectionate orientation knew more accurately than others about whether their children were bullied and how severely they were victimized. Afifi and Steuber (2009) have demonstrated that individuals assess the risk of revealing secret information to someone vis-à-vis their relationship with that person and this risk assessment, in turn, predicts the actual communication strategy used by those individuals in revealing the secret.…”

Parental Knowledge of Adolescents’ Online Content and Contact Risks

“…For example, child disclosure is stimulated in the context of high parental responsiveness, high behavioral control, and low psychological control (Soenens et al 2006). Specifically in relation to the victimization of bullying, parental knowledge about this is most likely in an open and affectionate family climate (Matsunaga 2009). …”

A qualitative study into parental mediation of adolescents' internet use

“…Studies show that parents are often unaware of their children's internet behavior and experiences. For example, among younger as well as older adolescents, studies found that parents tend to underestimate their children's own cyberbullying behavior as well as their children's experiences with cyberbully victimization (Byrne, Katz, Lee, Linz, & McIlrath, 2014;Dehue, Bolman, & Völlink, 2008;Matsunaga, 2009). An in-depth study on parental mediation among younger children found that parents tend to be confident in their internet parenting, but the author suggests that this confidence is not always substantiated and may be biased due to the low actual parental involvement in children's internet use (Shin, 2015).…”