Parental Responsibility, Blameworthiness, and Bullying: Parenting Style and Adolescents’ Experiences With Traditional Bullying and Cyberbullying

• Author: Dylan Reynolds,Ryan Broll
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Date: 01 June 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0887403420921443
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0887403420921443

Criminal Justice Policy Review

2021, Vol. 32(5) 447 –468

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0887403420921443

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Article

Parental Responsibility,

Blameworthiness, and

Bullying: Parenting Style and

Adolescents’ Experiences

With Traditional Bullying and

Cyberbullying

Ryan Broll1 and Dylan Reynolds1

Abstract

Parents are deemed morally—and, increasingly, legally—responsible for their

children’s misbehavior, and their parental aptitude is questioned if their children

are victimized. Parental responsibility laws and blameworthiness extend to common

occurrences like bullying. Literature broadly supports these principles for some

offenses through findings that effective parenting styles are associated with improved

adolescent outcomes, but evidence about the relationship between parenting styles

and bullying is underdeveloped and inconclusive. To study the relationship between

parenting styles and traditional bullying and cyberbullying offending and victimization,

data were collected from a sample of 435 Canadian middle and high school students.

The results suggest that parenting styles are not associated with traditional bullying

offending or victimization; however, neglectful parenting was associated with

cyberbullying offending and indulgent parenting was associated with cyberbullying

victimization. These findings suggest that the demandingness dimension of parenting,

which is characterized by rule setting and monitoring, is important for cyberbullying

prevention.

Keywords

traditional bullying, cyberbullying, parenting styles, parental responsibility, Canada

1University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Ryan Broll, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph, 50 Stone Road East,

Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1.

Email: rbroll@uoguelph.ca

921443CJPXXX10.1177/0887403420921443Criminal Justice Policy ReviewBroll and Reynolds

research-article2020

448 Criminal Justice Policy Review 32(5)

Parents are often implicitly or explicitly deemed morally accountable for their chil-

dren’s transgressions. In some jurisdictions, parents’ blameworthiness is formalized

under the purview of “parental responsibility” laws (Geis & Binder, 1991). Under

parental responsibility legislation, all U.S. states allow parents to be held civilly liable

for their children’s actions, and some states allow parents to be held criminally

accountable for their children’s crimes (Brank & Weisz, 2004). Parental responsibility

laws are not limited to the United States. In Canada, for instance, three provinces

(Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia) allow parents to be held liable for some

forms of youthful deviance (The Globe & Mail, 2018). Addressing the quandary of

holding citizens responsible for the actions of others, Le Sage and De Ruyter (2008)

argue that parents represent a unique case because they are obliged to raise morally

competent offspring. According to their reasoning, parental responsibility laws are

just. Parental responsibility laws are further supported by evidence that parenting

practices do influence children’s outcomes. For example, parenting styles—or, the

extent to which parents exhibit demandingness and responsiveness in child rearing—

are associated with youthful delinquency (Hoeve et al., 2009).

While previously reserved for rare but serious offenses, parental responsibility

legislation has been extended to common forms of youthful deviance, like bullying.

In 2013, after the cyberbullying and ensuing suicide of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons,

Nova Scotia—an Eastern Canadian province—passed the Cyber-Safety Act,1 which

included provisions to hold parents financially and morally responsible if their child

cyberbullied others (The Globe & Mail, 2018). Likewise, since 2017, the parents of

bullies in North Tonawanda, New York, may be fined US$250 (approximately

Can$350) and jailed for up to 15 days. In June 2019, the city council in Wisconsin

Rapids, Wisconsin, proposed fining parents up to US$313 (approximately Can$435)

if their children bully others (Bogel-Burroughs, 2019).

Parents’ aptitude and care for their children may also be questioned when their

child is a victim of bullying, and especially when adolescent suicides are linked to

bullying. For example, writing for the Huffington Post about Amanda Todd, a Canadian

teenager who committed suicide in 2012 after experiencing relentless bullying and

cyberbullying when her nude images were posted online, Shapiro (2012) mused,

Can we place blame on her parents? I don’t know them, I don’t know what kinds of

guidelines she was provided with regard to online safety. I don’t know if she broke their

rules or whether they had none. I don’t know what kind of home she had that she couldn’t

tell her parents what she’d done so they could call the police and put a stop to her torment.

Bullying offending and victimization are broadly categorized as traditional and

cyber. Traditional bullying refers to “any unwanted aggressive behavior(s) by another

youth or group of youth . . . that involves an observed power imbalance and is repeated

multiple times or is highly likely to be repeated” (Gladden et al., 2014, p. 7).

Cyberbullying occurs when the “unwanted aggressive behavior” is mediated by tech-

nology (Gladden et al., 2014). Recent reports from the World Health Organization

(WHO, 2019) and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization