Cheung, Hoi Shan

Cyberbullying victimization and mental health symptoms are major concerns for children and adolescents worldwide. Despite the increasing number of longitudinal studies of cyberbullying and mental health among this demographic, the robustness of the causal associations between cyberbullying victimization and the magnitude of mental health symptoms remains unclear. This meta-analysis investigated the longitudinal impact of cyberbullying victimization on mental health symptoms among children and adolescents. A systematic search identified primary studies published in English between January 2010 and June 2021, yielding a sample of 27 studies encompassing 13,497 children and adolescents aged 8 to 19 years old. The longitudinal association between cyberbullying victimization and mental health symptoms among children and adolescents was found to be weakly positive and consistent across time and age. Three significant moderators were identified: the effect of cyberbullying victimization on mental health was larger among older children, groups with a higher proportion of males, and in more recent publications. No evidence of publication bias was detected. This study adds to the existing body of research by providing a new perspective on the long-term effects of cyberbullying victimization on the mental health of children and adolescents’ mental health. Furthermore, it underscores the necessity of developing effective cyberbullying prevention programs, interventions, and legal regulations to comprehensively address this issue.

This study examined how children’s secure base script knowledge and friendship quality were related to bullying and victimization experiences and their emotional, academic, and behavioral adjustment. Participants were 581 children (49.6% males) aged 9 to 13 years old and one of their main caregivers (74% mothers, 23.6% fathers, 2.4% legal guardians) recruited through cluster sampling in Singapore. Most of the children were ethnic Chinese (58.2%), along with Malays, Indians, and Others (e.g. Eurasians). Children’s secure base script knowledge was related to less bullying and victimization, which in turn was related to greater positive emotional state, better academic achievement, less aggression, and fewer social problems. Friendship quality did not add unique variance, highlighting the central protective role of attachment representation in the context of school bullying. The findings provide support for the security-competence link in an Asian context, and point to the importance of enhancing children’s familial experiences as part of preventive efforts in combating school bullying.

This concept paper introduces a special section on Parenting Across Cultures: Bridging Commonalities and Specificities in Parental Control and Warmth. In this article, we explore how parental control and warmth manifest and function across diverse cultural contexts, emphasizing both common patterns and culturally specific practices. We acknowledge that contemporary parenting theories and models, even when they were first conceived based on an Anglo White-centric perspective, are increasingly being re-interpreted to describe culture-specific parenting behaviors. To better examine the functions of parental control and warmth across cultures, we advocate for the use of a dimensional approach that will more adequately describe the unique and shared aspects of parenting behaviors. This special section is a collection of four empirical studies that focused on understudied cultures, including families from Indonesia, Singapore, Türkiye, and Chinese immigrants in the United States. The overarching aim is to provide a more nuanced understanding of how parental control and warmth may contribute to children’s development and adjustment. The findings underscore the importance of considering cultural norms and children’s perceptions in parenting research, with implications for theory advancement, practice, and policy design and implementation.

Physical punishment is associated with numerous negative child outcomes, including poor adjustment, antisocial behavior and poor parent-child relationships. Despite the extensively documented negative consequences, many parents continue to use it. This qualitative study examines parents’ motivations for using physical punishment, which provides crucial insights to facilitate interventions that reduce its use. The study addresses a knowledge gap by exploring the contextual nuances of parents’ use of physical punishment. Twenty parents (six fathers) with children aged 2 to 12 who were residing in Singapore participated in the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand parents’ attitudes toward physical punishment, the reasons and contexts of its use, and parents’ inner experiences when using physical punishment. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was conducted. The results show that despite parents’ self-professed use of physical punishment, they expressed discomfort toward it and readily acknowledged its drawbacks. Meting out physical punishment was an intensely negative experience for parents and children, often resulting in parents experiencing guilt and pain. While physical punishment was often used as a last resort, or when parents wished to emphasize the severity of the child’s transgression, parents’ mood and stress also factored heavily into its use. There is a need for efforts to move beyond education and advocacy on the negative impact of physical punishment, which parents are aware of. Interventions should focus on helping parents regulate their emotions effectively in discipline situations, and to provide behavioral support for parents who may struggle to change existing discipline patterns.

Digital parenting is being enacted in a rapidly digitalized context and it impacts different children's outcomes. The present study employs an umbrella review involving 31 reviews to derive insights on different aspects of relationships between digital parenting and child development. Results showed that digital parenting had been conceptualized as comprising three dimensions (parental mediation, parents' use of digital technologies, and parents' role-modeling the use of digital technologies) that encompassed what parents did at home and for supporting their children's school learning. Parents and children's media-related variables (e.g., attitudes, technological access and skills) predicted the enactment of digital parenting. Digital parenting was inextricably related to general parenting in that it extended general parenting in the digital environment and it facilitated general parenting. Research was characterized by the use of cross-sectional designs, examination of either a single or multiple aspects of digital parenting, the use of parent or child self-reported perceptions, and the application of exploratory factor analytical approaches. Digital parenting impacted children's online behaviors, exposure to online risks, psychological and emotional wellbeing, digital literacy, and privacy protection. The present study contributes to the scholarship by providing a comprehensive conceptualization of digital parenting, underscoring the protective and promotive functions of digital parenting in child development, and highlighting the need for methodological enhancements in the measurement of digital parenting. It also identifies areas in digital parenting research where the evidence has been mixed or inadequate and therefore, points the way forward for future research.

Smartphone addiction is one of the major social issues among young people these days. The current study aims to identify the determinants of smartphone addiction and examine the association between smartphone addiction and multiple behavioral/psychological problems. The study sample consisted of 1105 university students from Singapore. Students in the high-risk smartphone use group reported higher levels of smartphone addiction, cybervictimization, and depressive and anxiety symptoms. Depressive and anxiety symptoms showed a positive association with smartphone addiction. Additionally, both depressive and anxiety symptoms had significant indirect effects when assessing two separate simple mediation models. When testing the parallel mediation model, the indirect effect of cybervictimization on smartphone addiction occurred through anxiety but not depression. Based on these findings, the current study proposed the implementation of routine screening and the provision of multi-level services in education settings. Nevertheless, the study has limitations related to the study population and the use of self-reported questionnaires.