Children who are exposed to negative parenting – including abuse, neglect but also overprotection – are more likely to experience childhood bullying by their peers, according to a meta-analysis of 70 studies of more than 200,000 children.
via Poor parenting—including overprotection—increases bullying risk.
I think the meta-study linking poor parenting and bullying is well made. It’s about time that this link has made it in to the literature and been taken up by interested parties like Generation Next because it is already so well known by counsellors in practice. I would like to add though that it doesn’t stop there. Why would parents be enacting “negative or harsh parenting”? Even if parents are unaware of many of the finer points of effective parenting, this can be compensated for to a certain extent by a benign attitude.
My experience of many years talking to young people and their parents shows that it is most usually bitter conflict in the parental relationship that constrains parents from being pro-actively affectionate, interested and interesting, or at the very least responding positively to their children. And again, those difficulties often spring from the adults’ deeply felt unrequited pain from the past expressing itself as critical blaming and contentious behaviours towards their partners and their children. Basically bullying is the tip of the iceberg, a symptom of the parents’ mental and emotional health, rather than something rotten residing in the young person.
Peter Olorenshaw
Counsellor