Parental neglect and peer victimization travel together in adolescence, but one may not cause the other

Two of the most corrosive experiences in adolescence—being neglected by parents and being victimized by peers—have long been assumed to feed each other: a neglected child, the thinking goes, becomes an easier target at school, and a bullied child retreats from an already distant home. A new longitudinal study from Hunan University of Chinese Medicine, published in BMC Psychology, puts that causal storyline to a rigorous statistical test and finds it largely unsupported. Adolescents who reported parental neglect did tend to report peer victimization, but the two experiences appear to travel together as stable co-occurring conditions rather than one triggering the other over time.

The research team followed 1,132 adolescents in 23 classrooms at two urban middle schools, surveying them at three waves spaced six months apart. The participants, drawn from the parent longitudinal study approved by the Ethics Committee of Hunan University of Chinese Medicine, provided written informed consent along with a parent or legal guardian. Neglect was measured with reports covering the preceding 12 months, while peer victimization captured experiences across the same intervals, allowing the researchers to model how changes in one domain related to changes in the other across adjacent six-month periods.

The methodological centerpiece was a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model, or RI-CLPM, an analytical framework that has reshaped how developmental scientists interpret longitudinal panel data. Traditional cross-lagged panel models conflate two fundamentally different sources of association: stable differences between adolescents that persist across the whole study, and moment-to-moment temporal dynamics within each individual adolescent. The RI-CLPM separates these by assigning each adolescent a random intercept—a stable trait-like level of neglect and victimization—and then examining whether deviations from that personal baseline at one wave predict deviations at the next. Only the second, within-person component speaks to causal processes unfolding over time.

The between-adolescent results were clear and consistent. The pooled random-intercept covariance between parental neglect and peer victimization was 0.309, with a 95% credible interval spanning 0.233 to 0.384—a positive association indicating that adolescents with higher stable levels of neglect also carried higher stable levels of peer victimization across the entire study period. In practical terms, the two adversities clustered in the same young people as enduring characteristics, echoing decades of research showing that family adversity and peer mistreatment tend to co-occur in adolescence.

The within-person results, however, told a strikingly different story. When the researchers examined whether an adolescent’s own deviation from their personal baseline of neglect at one wave predicted a deviation in victimization at the next wave, the cross-lagged association from neglect to victimization was −0.052, with a 95% credible interval from −0.180 to 0.077—an interval that straddles zero and therefore provides no evidence of a directional effect. The reverse pathway, from victimization to neglect, was similarly null at −0.051, with a credible interval from −0.165 to 0.062. Neither direction showed a statistically detectable average within-person cross-lagged association in this design.

To probe the finding further, the team conducted exploratory cross-lagged panel network analyses, examining whether specific items within the neglect and victimization scales showed recurring cross-domain associations across the intervals. Using least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regularization to identify robust patterns, the item-level analyses found no recurring cross-domain association that held up consistently across waves. The absence of robust item-level signatures suggests the null within-person result was not masking a handful of specific neglect behaviors—such as lack of supervision or emotional unavailability—driving specific forms of peer mistreatment in a way the aggregate analysis would have obscured.

The authors are careful to note an important technical limitation: because neglect reports covered the preceding 12 months, adjacent recall windows overlapped by approximately six months, which constrains how precisely temporal effects can be interpreted. This overlap means the study cannot exclude weak, differently timed, or heterogeneous within-person processes—effects that might operate on shorter timescales, vary across adolescents, or emerge only under specific conditions the six-month design could not capture. The null result is a statement about what this design detected, not a definitive claim that no within-person dynamics exist anywhere in the data.

Still, the findings carry substantial weight for how scientists and practitioners think about the link between family and peer contexts. The stable between-adolescent co-occurrence supports considering family and peer experiences jointly in assessment: a clinician or school counselor identifying parental neglect should be alert to the elevated likelihood of peer victimization, and vice versa. But the absence of significant within-person cross-lagged associations cautions against assuming that intervening on one domain will automatically reduce the other over time—a causal assumption that many prevention programs have implicitly made without longitudinal evidence at the individual level.

The study also illustrates a broader methodological shift sweeping through developmental psychology. As random-intercept cross-lagged panel models become standard, many previously reported cross-lagged effects in panel studies are being reinterpreted as artifacts of stable between-person differences rather than genuine within-person dynamics. This study adds parental neglect and peer victimization to the growing list of adversity pairings where the apparent longitudinal association dissolves once stable trait-like levels are properly separated from temporal change, underscoring why the distinction between between-person and within-person inference matters for science communication as much as for research design.

For now, the message for researchers, educators, and families is nuanced. Parental neglect and peer victimization do cluster together in adolescence as enduring, co-occurring adversities, and the two contexts deserve joint attention in assessment and support. But the evidence from this six-month, three-wave design does not show one experience causing the other within individuals over time. Understanding whether weak or differently timed dynamics exist—and whether they vary across adolescents—will require studies with finer temporal resolution, longer follow-up, and designs capable of capturing heterogeneous processes that the current analysis, by its own careful admission, could not rule out.

Subject of Research: Parental neglect and peer victimization: stable between-adolescent co-occurrence but no significant within-person cross-lagged associations

Article Title: Parental neglect and peer victimization: stable between-adolescent co-occurrence but no significant within-person cross-lagged associations

Article References: Li, Z., Guo, M., Mao, H., Chen, J., & Zhang, B. (2026). Parental neglect and peer victimization: stable between-adolescent co-occurrence but no significant within-person cross-lagged associations. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05622-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05622-y

Keywords: adolescence, parental neglect, peer victimization, longitudinal study, developmental psychology, RI-CLPM, BMC Psychology, Parental, neglect, peer, victimization, stable