Trajectories of Childhood Maltreatment and Bullying of Adolescents in South Korea

Child maltreatment has a critical impact on the lives of children. Maladaptive parenting may interrupt the process of establishing healthy peer relationships as the quality of parent-child bonds determines positive or negative child outcomes. Although maladaptive parenting is known as a risk factor for predicting bullying perpetration and victimization, there has been little consideration of its developmental influences. We aimed to investigate the association between trajectories of parental maltreatment and peer bullying experiences from childhood to adolescence in Korea. Four waves of the nationally-representative Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey were used to assess parental abuse and neglect from grades four to seven (N = 2179; age range from 10–11 to 13–14). Latent class growth analysis identified trajectories of maltreatment, and logistic regression highlighted the relationship between derived trajectories and bullying engagement. Three latent groups of maltreatment trajectories were found and were named as low (59.26%), high neglect (30.02%), and high abuse (10.72%). Results from the logistic regression indicated that the high abuse trajectory was more strongly associated with higher rates of both bullying perpetration and victimization than the low trajectory. This study has implications for identifying long-term influences of abusive parenting in contrast to neglectful parenting over the course of childhood for engagement in adolescent bullying behavior. Findings may provide insights for prevention, intervention, and school bullying policies regarding developmental trajectories of maladaptive parenting.