Prenatal and family precursors of bullying involvement in childhood and their consequences into early adulthood

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Research on bullying started in earnest in 1982 when three young boys killed themselves in short succession in Norway, all leaving notes that they had been bullied by their peers. Many more suicides in children attributed to bullying have occurred since then. Killing oneself is the most extreme form of escaping the bullies. If not self-harm, being a victim of bullying can lead to a range of mental health and physical health problems in childhood. The increasing evidence of harm by bullying led to a conference on the prevention of bullying organised by President Obama and the First Lady in March 2011. In the President's words "If there's one goal of this conference, it's to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up. It's not." (1)However, whether children can put their experiences aside once they graduate from school, or whether involvement in bullying throws a long shadow over the lives of affected children is unknown. The first objective of this study is to find out about the long term effects of being bullied on health, work life and success, crime involvement and social adaptation in young adulthood. This will be accomplished by studying the effect of bullying in childhood on young adult outcome in two long term studies, the Avon Longitudinal Study in the UK (ALSPAC) and the Great Smoky Mountain Study in the USA (GSMS) that investigated children up to 18 and 26 years, respectively.Most approaches to beat bullying to date have focussed on schools. School interventions have been shown to have some but limited effects on reducing rates of bullying. To develop new innovative prevention or intervention strategies beyond the school setting, it is important to understand what makes children likely targets of bullies even before they enter school. Families are the primary place where children learn rules of how to behave, negotiate with their parents and siblings, or where they observe how parents and siblings treat each other and deal with conflicts. Thus when parents are harsh or hostile in their parenting or often fight with each other, does it affect how children deal with bullying by peers? Furthermore, even before the child is born, stress in pregnancy can affect the development of organs such as the brain and how children later deal with stress. Unknown is whether stress in pregnancy may make some children more likely to become targets of bullying because they show easily a reaction such as getting upset or start crying. Bullies home in on children who show strong emotional reactions. Finally, being a member of an ethnic minority group may result in more bullying. The second objective is to find out whether stress in pregnancy (family adversity, maternal anxiety and depression), family relations in the preschool years (i.e. problematic partner relationships, parenting) and individual characteristics (how emotional the child is, ethnicity) predicts who becomes a victim or bully at school age.The findings will help to develop new strategies to strengthen families and children and prevent children from becoming the target of bullying or use bullying to torment other children. Sources:1 http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/10/president-obama-first-lady-white-house-conference-bullying-prevention