The present study examined adolescents’ self-reported victimization and parents’ awareness of and their responses to bullying victimization. Contrary to what was expected, the parents’ reported bullying victimization rates were higher than those informed by the adolescents. Moreover, the parents’ awareness of bullying and the adolescents’ self-reported victimization were not related with the six parents’ examined responses.
4.1. Degree of Agreement between Child’s and Parents’ Reports of Bullying Victimization
Consistently with the hypothesis, a low degree of concordance between the child’s and the parents’ reports of bullying was found. Specifically, among the adolescents who reported being bullied, approximately 2% of the parents reported this same problem, whereas approximately 5% of the parents did not report that their child had been victimized. Contrary to previous research, the parents reported higher bullying victimization rates than did their children (
Holt et al. 2008). It is likely that parents are more inclined to consider bullying to be present in mild or moderate cases of peer victimization, whereas adolescents may be reluctant to inform adults about their bullying experiences, consider some aggressive events to not be serious enough, or only consider bullying to be present in cases where peer victimization is more intense. However, in line with previous research, the results showed that the parents tend to think that their child had been bullied when the child did not reported this (
Holt et al. 2008). Future studies should address how parent/child differences in defining bullying may affect parent/child concordance about bullying victimization rates.
4.2. Parents Responses to Victimization
The majority of parents reported responding to their child’s victimization by contacting a teacher/administrator from the school, followed by controlling internet access and cellphone use. This last response may be related with parents’ growing concern about cyberbullying, an evolved manifestation of traditional bullying performed through electronic and digital media (
Wright 2018). Nevertheless, a high percentage of parents also recommended maladaptive strategies for coping or responding to bullying, such as ignoring bullying or encouraging their child to defend herself/himself. Researchers have shown that talking to children about victimization and contacting the school are more appropriate responses than ignoring the problem or contacting the bully, as these responses can have negative corollaries for the victimized child (
Garnett et al. 2015;
Navarro et al. 2018). Indeed, system theories suggest that family responses are likely to influence children’s responses. This theoretical framework is useful when considering how family responses to bullying can contribute to mitigate the problem or to make the problem worse. Concretely, the family system theory suggests that a youth’s strategies for coping with bullying are likely to be shaped by the way their family system has coped with the problem (
Cross and Barnes 2014). If the family is unable to cope adaptively with bullying, this may further reinforce the use of maladaptive behaviors among young people experiencing difficulty in coping with bullying. For example, parental overprotective or permissive responses have been linked with bullying victimization (
Georgiou and Stavrinides 2013).
It was hypothesized that the parents’ responses would vary according to the parents’ awareness of bullying and the adolescent’s self-reported victimization. Contrary to our expectations, parents reporting that their children had been victimized and parents whose children reported being victimized reported a lower use of any of the coping responses than parents who did not report that their child had been victimized and those whose children reported not being victimized. This difference may be related to the fact that the number of non-victimized adolescents and the number of parents not reporting bullying victimization is much larger than the victimized adolescents and the parents reporting bullying victimization. However, parents whose children had not been victimized might have indicated a great number of coping responses guided by a social desirability bias according to which parents ought to cope with bullying in any possible way to show that they are always responsive to their children’s needs (
Hale et al. 2017). Another possibility is that the parents with non-victimized children are not sure how to suitably respond to bullying, and they have difficulties selecting the most effective strategy to protect their children (
Harcourt et al. 2014). Conversely, the parents whose children are victimized could have acquired previous experience from coping with bullying and are more selective with the used coping responses, or alternatively, they believe that the offered responses in the study are not effective in stopping bullying. Further research should explore how previous experiences dealing with bullying may impact parents’ responses to bullying victimization.
The primary aim of this study was to explore the association between adolescents/parents’ bullying reports and parents’ responses to their children’s victimization. Contrary to what was expected, the parents’ awareness of bullying victimization was related only with the parents’ likelihood of opting for the “talk with the bully” response. The parents with victimized children were not as likely to encourage their child to talk with their bully. In the same way, the adolescents’ reports of bullying victimization lowered the likelihood of the parents encouraging their children to defend themselves. This suggests that parents of victimized youth may feel that talking with the bully is not an effective response to stop the bullying and may believe that this response could make the victimization worse (
Mishna et al. 2006). Prior research has indicated that parents’ attitudes to bullying and their perception of school might be more associated with parents’ responses to bullying than their awareness of victimization (
Waasdorp et al. 2011).
Some variation in the parents’ responses to bullying was found according to the students’ demographic factors. Specifically, the findings suggest that there may be some developmental differences in the parents’ responses (e.g., parents with younger children are not likely to encourage their children to defend themselves or talk to bullies but would more probably contact schools and control internet access). Consistent with previous research (
Waasdorp et al. 2011), parents with younger children were more likely to more directly intervene in response to their children’s victimization by contacting schools or restricting the use of technology to deal with bullying, whereas parents with older children may encourage their child to solve the bullying themselves. The parents were also more likely to tell their female children to ignore the problem or do nothing about it. This last result may be related to parents still holding gender stereotypes, which means that they may see males as being more aggressive, courageous, independent, and assertive and females as more emotional, sensitive, people-oriented, and reliant. Accordingly, the parents who hold these views may believe that females will not be prepared to deal with bullying (
Morales et al. 2016). The parents might also view female bullying as being less serious because females do not normally engage as much in physical bullying as males (
Stubbs-Richardson et al. 2018). Further research should inquire how the internalization of specific feminine or masculine stereotypical traits could differently affect parents’ responses to bullying victimization.
4.3. Limitations
This study has several limitations that should be noted. First, the analyses in this study are cross-sectional and correlational and, therefore, inferences cannot be made about causality or directionality. Second, this study collected only self-reported data, and the relationships that we observed here could be influenced by a response bias. Third, our study sample comprised adolescents and their parents from a given region in Spain. The associations in other samples could differ. Moreover, it might be that the parents who completed surveys were different from the parents who did not complete surveys in ways that could have influenced the study findings. Fourth, the time frame used for the adolescents’ and parents’ reports of bullying victimization was different. The students were asked about their bullying experiences during the last month, whereas the parents were asked one open question without a specific time frame. This may explain the differences in parents and student ratings of bullying. Fifth, different types of bullying were analyzed together, and the parents’ responses could vary according with the bullying nature: physical, verbal, social, or cyber. Further studies should analyze differences in parents’ responses according to the type of bullying. Finally, we analyzed only parents’ awareness and their responses to bullying victimization. Further research should examine parents’ awareness and responses to bullying perpetration.
4.4. Practical Implications
The results of this study highlight the importance of cultivating parent–adolescent relationships to deal with bullying victimization processes. Previous research has documented that parents play a key role providing support and listening about children’s worries and problems, but also guiding their children to prevent or stop the bullying. The present findings point out that it is crucial to promote open communication between parents and children to disclose victimization and to offer social support (
Larrañaga et al. 2016;
Scott et al. 2016). Parents should be aware about the negative effects of maintaining a poor relationship with their children and learn how a relationship based on affection and open communication can help to offer support and emotional security when children face any problem. Moreover, given that many adolescents do not report bullying to their parents, practitioners should encourage parents to talk with their children about bullying and cyberbullying victimization to make children aware that they are there to listen and help cope with problems. Research has shown that parents providing emotional warmth facilitate adolescents’ disclosure of bullying involvement (
Elsaesser et al. 2017).
Previous studies emphasize the importance of parents actively participating in bullying prevention and intervention programs in order to be most effective (
Gradinger et al. 2017). The present results have shown that the parents seem to have high pro-bullying coping intentions. Indeed, the majority of the parents indicated that they would contact the school in order to deal with bullying. School administrators and teachers should use these intentions to foster the willingness to participate in a whole-school prevention program. Along the same lines, parents should be encouraged not only to talk with their children about bullying but also to notify schools about bullying and to work collaboratively with teachers to cope with bullying situations.