Effects of Parenting Programs on Bullying Prevention

Background and Purpose:

Bullying is a serious public health problem that affects both the well-being and social development of children. Bullying victimization has been linked to serious physical and psychological outcomes such as injury and depression. Meta-analysis studies have proposed that family and parental training play a pivotal role in bullying reduction and have suggested that future research specify and differentiate types of parental intervention in anti-bullying programs. Therefore, more information is needed to explore the effects of certain parental characteristics by employing different research designs and parent-involving methods. This meta-analysis aims to review school and home-based anti-bullying programs and examine the effect sizes of parental involvement and research characteristics of the programs.

Methods:

This meta-analysis aimed to review and examine parenting programs on bullying reduction that involving both school-based and home visiting anti-bullying programs. We searched English databases including ERIC, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts, Social Service Abstracts, and PubMed. Relevant articles published in or before March 2019 were identified through title, key word, and abstract searches. We included in the synthesis studies that met three criteria: (1) evaluation of prevention or intervention programs that focused on bullying among school-aged children; (2) the intervention programs included parent involvement such as parent training in schools or home visiting services from community, agency, or other stakeholders; and (3) the study provided enough data for calculating effect sizes. Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software Version 3.0 was used to conduct this process, and the effect sizes of those studies with 95% CIs were tabulated in forest plots. A heterogeneity test was conducted to identify the variance among studies. Subgroup analysis was then per- formed to test the effect sizes within or between different subgroups.

Results:

The overall effect size supported a significant outcome on bullying reduction (d= .640, 95%CI [0.239, 1.041]). Results of this meta-analysis reported that participants in the parenting programs scored significantly lower on both bullying and victimization. Data from the randomized controlled trials and the pre- and posttest design studies showed evidence of highly significant effects of parenting interventions on bullying reduction. Child- and parent-related factors including parenting style, children’s empathy, and parent–child interaction about bullying were found to be significantly related to the effectiveness of intervention pro- grams. Effect size synthesized via different time points showed that intervention effectiveness varied greatly across time but remained positive in the reported timeslots.

Conclusions and Implications:

This study provides evidence to enhance policy and practice for effectively enabling parent involvement in bullying behavior reduction and to increase parent-children communication about bullying as well as parenting skills. Future researchers and practitioners may explore more about the impact of school-family partnerships and their reliance on each other to help reduce bullying. More comprehensive screening and risk assessment based on the correlates of bullying should be developed in order to critically assess the range and consequences of victimization to which children have been potentially exposed, thereby providing more individualized service and improving intervention effectiveness.