Children’s Bullying Involvement and Mothers’ Mental and Emotional Health

• In Event: 2266 - Family Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Bullying, Family Violence, and Mental Health

Abstract

Although the effects of bullying involvement, perpetration or victimization, on children’s mental health have been established, how it relates to mothers’ mental and emotional health remains unclear. Research typically regards children’s problems as consequences of mothers’ poor mental health and rarely examines the possibility that children’s problems act as a stressor affecting mothers’ mental health. Using longitudinal data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 963), we conduct cross-lagged structural equation models to examine bidirectional associations between children’s bullying involvement and mothers’ mental health when children are in third, fifth, and sixth grades, focusing on variation by maternal education. Regardless of maternal education level, children’s bullying peers and being bullied by peers relate to subsequent mothers’ depressive symptoms and anger. For mothers without a college degree only, mothers’ depressive symptoms and anger relate to subsequent children’s bullying involvement. These findings underscore social class similarities and differences in dynamics of stress proliferation across generations.

Author

• Kei Nomaguchi, Bowling Green State University