Dissertação de Mestrado Saúde Mental nos Cuidados Primários 2023 Faculdade de Ciências Médicas, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

Bullying is a common form of violence among children and adolescents defined as «any unwanted aggressive behavior(s) by another youth or group of youths who are not siblings or current dating partners that involves an observed or perceived power imbalance and is repeated multiple times or is highly likely to be repeated” (Gladden et al., 2014). It is a public health problem (Armitage, 2021)and it was very frequent in Portugal between 1990-2010.(Picado, 2009) Children who were exposed to bullying are more likely to have mental health problems in adulthood than those not exposed, such as low self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, anxiety, depression, and self-harm or suicidality. (Ahmed et al., 2022) It has been stated that being a bullying victim leads to social maladjustments which impair the ability of creating high-quality interpersonal relationships in the future. Would that influence the relationship that bullying victims stablish with their children when became parents? The parent child relationship is a multidimensional concept, whose dimensions can be combined in a configurational way, defining a specific parenting style(Darling, 1999). So, the purpose of this dissertation is to understand how being victim of bullying by peers in the past influences parenting style. The author conducted a multimodal study composed of two parts, one retrospective, descriptive and quantitative aimed at characterizing past bullying victimization history through the completion of an online anonymous questionnaire, and another, exploratory and qualitative, based on grounded theory for exploring the participant’s experiences as parents through an online real-time face to face interview. The study included Portuguese men and women who identified themselves as victims of bulling in childhood or adolescence in school context and who were parents of at least one adolescent aged 10 to 15 years-old. The purposive sample was composed of 22 Portuguese adults (18 women and 4 men), aged 29 to 54 years-old (average 42.7 years-old), however only four (3 women, 1 men) accepted giving the zoom interview. Multiple themes and five categories (past bullying history characteristics, participant’s childhood story, child informative data, child involvement in bullying and parenting styles and dimensions) emerged from the analysis of both online questionnaires and interviews of the four participants. The integration of these findings ended in the development of a longitudinal trial- error model of parenting that places past bullying history as a «tuning tool» for parenting in the context of school-age children. The author also proposes that parents of bullied children or that are at risk for bullying victimization should be addressed for past bullying victimization and summarizes a set of interventions that can be used by physicians