Intergenerational Transmission of Bullying Perpetration

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Developmental Psychopathology

Abstract

Introduction: For a better understanding of the consequences of peer bullying and to break potential cycles of negative peer experiences across generations, it is important to not only study the consequences of bullying for those immediately involved, but also to explore if bullying perpetration may transmit to the next generation. It is suggested that parents who exhibited antisocial behaviours, for instance aggression and delinquent behaviour, are more likely to have children with the same antisocial behaviours (Kim et al., 2009). Based on work into the intergenerational transmission of aggressive behaviour (Kerr et al., 2018), intergenerational transmission of peer bullying perpetration seems plausible. Yet, bullying perpetration transmission has hardly been explored and available evidence is inconclusive (Farrington, 1993; Kerr et al., 2018). The present study investigated if peer bullying perpetration is transmitted across generations and to what extent this transmission is specific to bullying perpetration or could be explained by aggression in parents and/or offspring.

Method: Data from two British birth cohort studies (The National Child Development Study; NCDS and the British Cohort Study 1970; BCS70) (ns ranging from 709 to 1182) were used to test the transmission of bullying perpetration. We estimated separate structural equation models to test if parental bullying perpetration during childhood and adolescence predicted bullying in offspring during early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. For each age group, we first examined the unadjusted relationship between parental bullying and offspring bullying (model 1). If this association was statistically significant, we tested the transmission with the inclusion of aggression as explanatory mechanism (model 2) and the inclusion of other covariates, i.e., SES, gender of offspring, and same versus different gender of the parent-child dyad (model 3).

Results: For models based on NCDS data, we found no evidence that parental bullying predicted bullying in offspring, neither during childhood nor during adolescence. For models based on BCS70 data, we found evidence that parental bullying perpetration predicted early and middle childhood bullying in offspring, even (partially) over and above parents’ and offspring’s aggression (Figures 1 and 2).

Discussion: We only found support for an intergenerational transmission of bullying perpetration for offspring in early and middle childhood. This might be partly because bullying perpetration in childhood is more visible to parents and teachers and therefore easier to capture than in adolescence, where it is more strategic and manipulative of nature and possibly more hidden to their view (Kerr et al., 2018). A possible explanation why we found no intergenerational transmission of bullying for NCDS is that, contrary to the BCS70, parental bullying in the NCDS mostly was assessed in adolescence and this may not be a good predictor of childhood bullying in offspring due to incomparable age ranges (Conger et al., 2003). Our findings cannot be regarded as conclusive evidence of an intergenerational transmission of bullying perpetration. Intergenerational research into behavioural constructs, such as bullying perpetration, is needed to verify our findings and future studies should zoom in on potential pathways to the role parenting, norm-setting, and genetic transmission play.

Authors

• Maria Wiertsema, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (UG/RUG)
  Presenting Author

• Charlotte Vrijen, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (UG/RUG)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tina Kretschmer, University of Groningen
  Non-Presenting Author