The current study examines the relationship between parents’ and children’s reports of parenting and their effects on children’s mental health symptoms. Six hundred and sixty-six parent-child dyads in Taiwan participated in this study. The parents and the children filled out the parenting questionnaires, and the children also reported their general mental health. The results demonstrated that parental-reported and child-perceived parenting were positively correlated, but parents tended to report lower scores on authoritarian parenting and higher scores on Chinese parenting than did their children. There were also significant gender differences: The mothers reported higher authoritative parenting than did the fathers; and the boys perceived higher authoritarian and Chinese-culture specific parenting than did the girls. Moreover, the Chinese parenting had a negative effect on children’s mental health outcomes. Finally, our results showed that children’s perception of parenting had a stronger effect on children’s mental health symptoms than did parental reports on parenting, urging future research to include the children’s report when investigating the effects of parenting on children’s mental health outcomes.

Friendship is typically assumed to be a protective factor for victims of school bullying, so the possibility of victimization by friends is rarely explored. This study examines the prevalence of positive affiliation between the victims and aggressors in verbal and physical bullying. Peer nomination inventories were used to assess the friendship and dyadic bullying tendency among 237 Taiwanese middle school 7th graders. A total of 1,084 incidents of dyadic verbal bullying and 1,327 incidents of physical bullying were reported by the respondents. Friendship nominations among aggressors and victims could be unilateral (a peer nominates someone who does not in turn nominate them) or reciprocal (both the aggressor and the victim nominate each other as friends). Reciprocal nominations between victims and aggressors occurred in approximately 8% of cases of verbal bullying incidents and about 12% of physical bullying incidents. About 8% of victims of verbal or physical bullying unilaterally nominated the aggressor as a friend, with 9% and 12% of aggressors nominating victims as friends in the two cases. The self-reported strength of friendships was high among the reciprocal friends. Implications for the existence of bullying within friendship dyads for research and practice are discussed.

We examined multidimensional factors within four systems (individual, family, school, and community) that influence internet addiction across time among children through adolescence in Taiwan. We hypothesize that internet addiction increases from childhood to adolescence and that resilience, child neglect, positive school experiences, and community violence are significant predictors at baseline and of the rate of change across time. Based on stratified random sampling, a valid sample size of 6233 Taiwanese children participated in our study, which we began in 2014 and then followed this sample in 2016 and 2018 using repeated measures. We used hierarchical linear modeling to model changes in internet addiction across time (with equal two-year intervals between assessments) and the associations between the predictors and internet addiction over time. The results show that internet addiction increases from childhood to adolescence. After controlling for gender, we found that resilience and positive school experiences predict less internet addiction, whereas neglect and community violence predict greater internet addiction. Over time, greater resilience predicts a decreasing trajectory of internet addiction, whereas greater neglect and community violence predict a slower increasing trajectory and positive school experiences predict a faster-increasing trajectory. A holistic approach can help children cope with internet addiction.