The finding does not mean that parent questionnaires are unreliable or that children’s reports should replace them. Instead, the analysis indicates that asking a child directly may reveal internal and peer-related difficulties that are less visible outside school, while parents may be better positioned to notice conduct problems occurring at home. When child reports were added after parent reports, the statistical model improved substantially more than when parent reports were added after child reports. The combined model explained 21.0% of the variance in NSSI status, but neither informant alone approached definitive predictive accuracy. These results support a complementary, multi-informant approach rather than a contest over which perspective is universally superior.

Researchers collected paired questionnaires in December 2021 from students in grades four through six at eight primary schools in Dongli District, Tianjin. Children completed self-report forms in class with trained teachers and research assistants available for clarification and to preserve privacy, while parents completed questionnaires at home and returned them in sealed envelopes. Children provided assent and parents gave written consent. The investigators excluded incomplete or invalid questionnaires and cases missing either the child or parent Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, reducing the initial group of 4,206 students to 1,923 matched parent-child dyads. A complete-case sensitivity analysis produced results consistent with the primary analysis. Because the sampling was by convenience and the participating schools were in one district, the findings describe this particular sample rather than all children in Tianjin or China.

NSSI was measured with the 16-item short version of the Deliberate Self-Harm Inventory, which asks about intentional self-injury during the preceding six months. Each item ranges from never to three or more times, and endorsement of at least one behaviour placed a child in the NSSI group. The most common reported method was carving words, pictures, designs or other marks into the skin, reported by 65.5% of the NSSI group. Cutting the wrist, arms or another body area was reported by 33.9%, and scratching severely enough to cause scarring or bleeding by 30.4%. Biting until the skin broke was reported by 21.7%, while 3.1% reported self-harm that led to hospitalisation or medical treatment. The researchers note that suicidal intent was not assessed separately, so the classification was operational rather than a clinical confirmation that every episode occurred without suicidal intent.

Emotional and behavioural characteristics were assessed with child and parent versions of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, or SDQ. Its five subscales cover emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity and inattention, peer interaction problems and prosocial behaviour. In unadjusted comparisons, children in the NSSI group had higher scores on all four problem subscales in both informants’ reports and lower prosocial-behaviour scores. These group differences do not show that any feature preceded or caused the self-injury, because the survey measured children and behaviours at the same time. The SDQ is a screening instrument rather than a diagnostic assessment, and the study did not test whether its categories corresponded to diagnosed psychiatric disorders.

Multivariable logistic regression, adjusted for age and gender, produced a more nuanced pattern after all five SDQ subscales were entered simultaneously. With standardised scores, each one-standard-deviation increase in parent-reported emotional symptoms was associated with 1.26 times the odds of NSSI, compared with 1.66 for child-reported emotional symptoms. The corresponding odds ratios were 1.25 for parent-reported hyperactivity and 1.39 for child-reported hyperactivity. Child-reported peer interaction problems were associated with NSSI, with an odds ratio of 1.24, whereas parent-reported peer interaction problems were not significant after adjustment. Parent-reported conduct problems were also associated with NSSI, with an odds ratio of 1.18, whereas child-reported conduct problems and prosocial behaviour were not significant after adjustment. These are associations in odds, not changes in an individual child’s probability caused by a symptom score, and the study cannot establish which problems preceded the behaviour.

Formal joint models were then used to compare coefficients for the same SDQ subscale when both child and parent reports were included simultaneously. Wald tests indicated that the associations were statistically significantly larger for child-reported emotional symptoms, hyperactivity and peer interaction problems, with false-discovery-rate-adjusted p-values below 0.001 in each case. The investigators did not find significant differences for conduct problems or prosocial behaviour. Parent-reported peer interaction problems differed between the NSSI and non-NSSI groups in simple comparisons but were no longer significant after adjustment, apparently because their variation overlapped with the other SDQ subscales included in the model. The results therefore describe differences in measured statistical associations; they do not prove that one informant is inherently more accurate, nor do they establish a mechanism for the differences.

Child reports also improved discrimination between children classified with and without NSSI. The child-report model produced an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, or AUC, of 0.753 with a 95% confidence interval of 0.732 to 0.779, indicating moderate discrimination. The parent-report model yielded an AUC of 0.659, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.638 to 0.694. The difference was statistically significant in a DeLong test for correlated curves, with Z equal to -7.75 and p below 0.001. Nevertheless, an AUC of 0.753 should not be presented as high accuracy or as proof that child reports are more truthful. The models were evaluated in the same cross-sectional sample, with no independent screening validation, so their performance cannot automatically be transferred to another school, region or clinical setting.

Several limitations constrain the interpretation and likely contributed to the apparently stronger child-report results. NSSI and the child SDQ came from the same respondent, creating possible shared-method variance: a child who reports both emotional distress and self-injury may therefore show a stronger association than a parent’s report can reproduce. The DSHI-s was developed for adolescents, and the self-report SDQ is officially recommended for children aged 11 and above, although previous research has reported acceptable psychometric properties in children as young as 8 to 10. Additional validation is therefore needed for these instruments among Chinese children aged 9 to 12. The study also did not independently verify self-injury through clinical interview or another informant, and the functions of the behaviour, such as emotion regulation or social signalling, were not assessed.

The design also prevents conclusions about temporal sequence, causation, prevalence across all Chinese children or the reasons children self-injure. The models adjusted only for age and gender, leaving possible influences such as socioeconomic conditions, parental mental health, academic stress, peer victimisation and parenting style unmeasured. More than half of the initially enrolled students were excluded because complete matched data were unavailable, which may also have introduced selection effects. The study’s clearest conclusion is that, in this particular sample of 9- to 12-year-olds, child and parent questionnaires supplied overlapping but non-identical information: children contributed particularly strong signals about internal distress, hyperactivity and peer problems linked to concurrent self-reported self-injury, while parents contributed additional information that was modest but measurable when added after child reports. Any use of these findings in screening would require further validation rather than treating either report as a standalone diagnostic test.

Subject of Research: Comparison of child and parent reports of emotional and behavioural correlates of self-reported non-suicidal self-injury among preadolescents in Tianjin

Article Title: Emotional and behavioural problems and non-suicidal self-injury in preadolescent children: complementary insights from child and parent reports

Article References: Yang, T., Li, M., Yu, H., Hou, X., Yan, G., Li, B., Ma, H., Sun, L., Yin, H., & Xu, G. (2026). Emotional and behavioural problems and non-suicidal self-injury in preadolescent children: complementary insights from child and parent reports. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, Article 1973448. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1973448

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1973448

Keywords: preadolescents, self-injury, child self-report, parent report, emotional symptoms, hyperactivity, peer problems, school-based survey, Tianjin, mental health, Emotional, behavioural

The research team, led by Raymond Sturner of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Center for Promotion of Child Development through Primary Care, set out to build an optimal algorithm of parent-administered items for detecting both autism and general developmental delay at the 18-month visit. Their starting point was a candid assessment of why existing screens fall short. The Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers, Revised with Follow-Up (M-CHAT-R/F), the most widely used autism screener, has documented weaknesses at this young age. Its positive predictive value drops sharply in younger toddlers, with community samples reporting values as low as .28 to .36 at around 18 months compared with .61 to .69 in older children. The required follow-up interview, designed to rescue that predictive value, is rarely completed in real primary care, and even research studies apply it inconsistently.

There is a deeper structural problem, too. Validation studies of the M-CHAT-R/F have generally not included diagnostic evaluations of representative samples of children who passed the screen, which makes honest estimates of sensitivity and specificity nearly impossible. Prior work by the same team, drawing on a large community sample that included matched screen-negative children, found the sensitivity of the M-CHAT-R/F to be just .36, well below the Q-CHAT-10-O, an ordinally scored version of the Quantitative Checklist for Autism in Toddlers, which reached .63 with half the items and no follow-up interview. No autism screen for the 18-month age group has ever achieved the generally recommended performance benchmark of greater than .70 for both sensitivity and specificity in community samples, for autism or for developmental delay.

The new study took an unusually ambitious approach to item selection. Rather than writing questions from scratch, the researchers curated candidate items from the most commonly used autism screens, including the M-CHAT-R/F, the Parent’s Observation of Social Interaction, and the Q-CHAT-10-O, and supplemented them with items drawn from longitudinal studies of children at elevated likelihood for autism: the First Year Inventory developed at the University of North Carolina and the Parent Observation of Early Markers Scales from Brock University. They also included expressive vocabulary items from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI), because prior work had shown that vocabulary production is a powerful contributor to autism prediction around 18 months, even though expressive language delay is not itself a DSM-5 diagnostic criterion for autism.

The scale of the community data collection was substantial. Parents of 11,878 children aged 16 to 20 months, recruited from research-enrolled community pediatric offices in Maryland, Massachusetts, and North Carolina, completed the M-CHAT-R, the Q-CHAT-10, and the age-appropriate Ages and Stages Questionnaires-3 through an online screening system before scheduled 18-month visits. From the 787 children with any positive screen, plus matched controls who passed both screens, the team enrolled families willing to undergo full diagnostic testing. After exclusions and attrition, the final sample comprised 408 children with complete data on key measures and confirmed case status. Diagnostic evaluations used the ADOS-2 Toddler Module administered by testers blind to screening results, together with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning. Developmental delay was defined using criteria that mirror the thresholds most states apply for early intervention eligibility.

The analytical machinery was equally distinctive. The team fitted the MCDI Words and Sentences vocabulary data, obtained from the open Wordbank database, to a Rasch measurement model in which individual words carry difficulty scores on the same logit scale as toddler ability estimates. That allowed them to build a computerized adaptive testing version of the vocabulary checklist, in which each word presented depends on the respondent’s previous answers, cutting response burden while simulation studies confirmed the short form retained high person reliability of .98 and person separation of 6.78. For classification, they applied gradient-boosted tree modeling with feature selection via the Boruta method and Shapley values, plus Bayesian hyperparameter optimization. To guard against machine learning capitalizing on chance associations, models were trained on a synthetic dataset of 25,000 cases generated from roughly half the authentic data, validated on a synthetic set of 12,500 cases, and then evaluated on an authentic holdback sample of 202 children.

The resulting instrument, which the authors call the Toddler Autism and Developmental Adaptive Screen, distills the candidate pool down to just 19 features. The final model is anchored by expressive vocabulary percentile and items representing joint attention, the cluster of behaviors, pointing to share interest, following a point, showing objects just to share, and shifting eye gaze to check a parent’s reaction, that decades of prospective sibling studies have identified as the earliest and most consistent emerging signs of autism. Other retained items probe pretend play, unusual finger movements, sensitivity to noise, and imitation of household activities. Notably, the machine learning process retained some redundant content in multiple wordings from different source instruments, which the authors interpret as reflecting both the clinical importance of those topics and the value of asking things in several ways to ensure accurate parent report.

The performance numbers are the headline. On the authentic holdback sample, the new model’s sensitivity for autism reached .77, compared with .36 for the M-CHAT-R/F administered to the same children, roughly a doubling of detection rate. It also outperformed the Q-CHAT-10-O (.77 versus .63) in this 16-to-20-month age group. For developmental delay, the screen achieved sensitivity and specificity both above .70, with a positive predictive value of .60, and proved twice as sensitive as the standard ASQ-3 general developmental screen (.73 versus .39) against state early intervention eligibility criteria. The authors report that the tool appears to be the only screen for this age with generally recommended performance, over .70 on both sensitivity and specificity, for both autism and developmental delay simultaneously. Positive predictive value for autism, at .37, was not significantly higher than the M-CHAT-R/F’s, a reminder that no screening tool escapes the base-rate problem entirely.

One of the most conceptually interesting findings concerns how the same items behave differently depending on the outcome being predicted. Twelve items were identified for detecting developmental delay, half of them overlapping with the autism item set, yet none are weighted the same way for the two purposes, and one item about favorite activities even flips its meaning, with reading books weighting toward delay and lining up objects weighting toward autism. Rather than relying on simple cut scores, the model weights each feature in combination with the others, mirroring the way autism is clinically defined as a syndrome of features rather than a single deficit. The authors emphasize that the instrument is intended as a primary screening tool, not a diagnostic one, producing a pass or fail for autism, a separate pass or fail for developmental delay, and an expressive vocabulary percentile for age.

Practical advantages could matter as much as raw accuracy. The entire screen consists of 18 standard items plus an adaptive vocabulary measure capped at 25 words, where the current standard practice of administering both the M-CHAT-R and the ASQ-3 requires 50 caregiver items plus a follow-up interview that often never happens. No follow-up interview is needed, results can integrate with electronic health records, and smartphone administration makes the approach feasible even in low-income settings. The authors are candid about limitations: the sample over-represented highly educated parents, attrition affected both screen-positive and screen-negative groups, children exposed to English less than half the time were excluded, and not every child with autism is detectable at 18 months, so continued surveillance at older ages remains essential. The assembled tool is now being tested in a larger, more socioeconomically diverse community sample. If those results replicate, the humble parent questionnaire, retooled with item response theory and machine learning, could become one of the most consequential screening advances in early child development.

Subject of Research: Machine learning-based parent-report screening for autism and developmental delay at the 18-month pediatric visit

Article Title: Exploring the Potential of Parent Report for Autism/Developmental Screening at the 18-Month Visit

Article References: Sturner, R., Bergmann, P., Howard, B., Robins, D., Bet, K., & Attar, S. (2026). Exploring the Potential of Parent Report for Autism/Developmental Screening at the 18-Month Visit. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07472-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07472-4

Keywords: autism screening, developmental delay, M-CHAT, 18-month visit, parent report, machine learning, early intervention, joint attention, expressive vocabulary, pediatrics, computerized adaptive testing, Q-CHAT

The research, conducted by Méliza Gagnon, Simon Morand-Beaulieu, and Julie B. Leclerc of the Université du Québec à Montréal, surveyed 289 parents of children aged 6 to 14 with Tourette syndrome, a sample in which 75 percent of the children were boys and the average age was 10.6 years. Parents completed validated measures assessing tic severity, explosive outbursts, and family functioning across the domains described by the well-established McMaster Model of Family Functioning. The researchers then used hierarchical regression analyses, statistically controlling for tic severity and comorbid conditions, to isolate the unique contribution of explosive outbursts to each dimension of family life.

The results were striking in their specificity. Explosive outburst severity significantly predicted impairment in four of the seven dimensions examined: problem solving, roles, behavior control, and general functioning. In other words, families contending with frequent or severe outbursts reported greater difficulty identifying and resolving practical problems, more confusion about who is responsible for what within the household, less consistent and predictable management of child behavior, and poorer overall family health. These are the organizational and regulatory scaffolding of daily family life—the structures that allow a household to plan, coordinate, and respond flexibly to challenges.

Equally informative were the dimensions that showed no association with explosive outbursts. Affective responsiveness, affective involvement, and communication were not significantly predicted by outburst severity. Families dealing with rage attacks did not report, on average, greater difficulty experiencing and expressing emotions, showing interest and concern for one another, or exchanging information. This dissociation suggests that explosive outbursts in Tourette syndrome carry a distinct clinical profile: they corrode the operational machinery of the family while leaving the emotional connective tissue comparatively intact, at least as perceived by parents.

Perhaps the most consequential finding is what did not predict family impairment. Neither tic severity nor comorbid psychiatric conditions emerged as significant predictors of any family functioning dimension once explosive outbursts were accounted for. This is a meaningful reversal of intuition. Tics are the visible hallmark of the disorder, and conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive symptoms are common and burdensome in Tourette syndrome. Yet when it comes to the day-to-day functioning of the family system, the data point squarely at the outbursts themselves. The finding aligns with a growing body of literature suggesting that rage attacks, rather than tics, are among the strongest drivers of impairment and distress in this population.

Explosive outbursts in Tourette syndrome have been documented clinically for decades. Early work by Budman and colleagues in 2000 described explosive episodes in children with Tourette’s disorder as sudden, intense, and often out of character for the child between episodes. Subsequent studies have estimated that between roughly 25 and 70 percent of individuals with the syndrome experience such episodes, depending on the population and definition used, with the current study citing a figure of approximately 50 percent of children. A 2020 systematic review by Conte and colleagues consolidated the evidence on rage attacks in Tourette syndrome and chronic tic disorders, highlighting their association with distress, functional impairment, and treatment-seeking. The phenomenon has also been linked to difficulties with inhibitory control and behavioral inflexibility, cognitive processes that a 2017 meta-analysis co-authored by Morand-Beaulieu found to be subtly but meaningfully altered in the syndrome.

Why would outbursts specifically erode problem solving, roles, behavior control, and general functioning? The authors suggest that these episodes create organizational and regulatory challenges for families. An explosive outburst is unpredictable, disruptive, and demanding of an immediate response. Over time, families may reorganize around the threat of the next episode: parents may adjust routines, redistribute responsibilities, or adopt inconsistent behavioral strategies in an effort to prevent or contain escalation. Such accommodations, while understandable, can blur role boundaries and undermine consistent behavior management, feeding back into the very dimensions the study found to be impaired. Previous research on family accommodation in chronic tic disorders, including work by Storch and colleagues in 2017, has documented how families adapt their own behavior in response to symptoms, sometimes at a cost to family functioning.

The methodological design strengthens the interpretive weight of these conclusions. By using hierarchical regressions that entered tic severity and comorbidities before testing the contribution of explosive outbursts, the researchers ensured that the observed associations were not simply artifacts of children having more severe Tourette syndrome overall or additional psychiatric diagnoses. The McMaster Model, operationalized through the Family Assessment Device developed by Epstein, Baldwin, and Bishop in 1983 and updated by Mansfield and colleagues in 2015, provides a theoretically grounded, multidimensional framework that has been validated across clinical populations. Measuring seven distinct dimensions rather than a single global index allowed the team to detect the selective pattern of impairment that a coarser measure would have obscured.

The clinical implications are direct. If explosive outbursts are the primary family-level target, then interventions should explicitly address them rather than assuming that tic reduction alone will relieve family strain. Comprehensive behavioral interventions for tics, such as habit reversal training, remain the first-line evidence-based treatment for tic symptoms, but they are not designed to target rage episodes. The study’s authors underscore the importance of targeting the processes underlying outbursts—potentially including emotion regulation, frustration tolerance, and behavioral flexibility—in treatment. Prior work by Leclerc and colleagues has explored self-management training for explosive episodes in children with Tourette syndrome, and the new findings provide a rationale for incorporating family-level components that support problem solving, role clarity, and consistent behavior control in the home.

The study also carries a message of reassurance, however cautious. The absence of associations with affective responsiveness, affective involvement, and communication suggests that the emotional bonds within these families are not systematically damaged by outbursts. Parents reporting difficulty managing daily logistics and behavior were not, on average, reporting emotional distance or breakdowns in communication. That distinction matters for clinicians and for families themselves: the problem is framed as one of organization and regulation rather than of love or connection, a framing that may reduce blame and stigma and point families toward practical, skills-based support. Future research, the authors note, will need to examine these relationships longitudinally and from multiple informants, including children and siblings, to fully map how explosive outbursts and family functioning influence each other over time. For now, the study makes a compelling case that in Tourette syndrome, the loudest symptom in the home is not always the most visible one—and that effective support begins by looking past the tics to the storms that surround them.

Subject of Research: The impact of explosive outbursts on family functioning in children with Tourette syndrome

Article Title: Explosive Outbursts in Children With Tourette Syndrome: A Closer Look at Family Functioning Dimensions

Article References: Gagnon, M., Morand-Beaulieu, S., & Leclerc, J. B. (2026). Explosive Outbursts in Children With Tourette Syndrome: A Closer Look at Family Functioning Dimensions. Child Psychiatry & Human Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-026-02099-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10578-026-02099-z

Keywords: Tourette syndrome, explosive outbursts, family functioning, tics, rage attacks, child psychiatry, McMaster Model, behavior control, problem solving, comorbidities, parent report, disruptive behavior

The analysis drew on an unusual and methodologically valuable data source. The National Health Interview Survey, the nation’s flagship household health interview, includes a follow-back component called NHIS-Teen, in which a randomly selected teenager aged 12 to 17 in each participating household answers questions directly. In the 2021-2022 cycle, 1,127 parent-teenager pairs provided usable responses, allowing the researchers to place two informants from the same family side by side on three distinct measures of bullying involvement: in-person bullying victimization, cyberbullying victimization, and bullying perpetration.

The technical challenge in such work is not simply asking two people the same question; it is quantifying how well their answers agree beyond what chance would predict. The team employed three complementary statistics. Percent agreement offers a raw measure of concordance but is inflated when the behavior in question is rare, because most pairs agree trivially by both saying no. Weighted kappa, the classic chance-corrected coefficient introduced by Landis and Koch, adjusts for chance agreement and categorizes concordance on a scale from slight to almost perfect. Prevalence-adjusted bias-adjusted kappa, or PABAK, further corrects for imbalances in how often each response category occurs and for systematic tendencies of one informant to report more or less than the other. Applying all three measures, the researchers found weighted kappa values ranging from fair to moderate for each form of bullying involvement, indicating that parents and teenagers agreed far from perfectly.

The direction of the disagreement was strikingly consistent. Across all three bullying measures, prevalence estimates built on teenager self-report exceeded those built on parent report. In other words, when a family contained a teenager who had been bullied in person, bullied online, or had bullied others, the parent was often unaware of it, and the teenager was seldom over-reporting relative to the parent. This pattern matches the authors’ hypotheses, which were grounded in prior literature showing that children and adolescents disclose victimization selectively, and that some experiences, particularly those occurring in digital spaces parents cannot observe, remain invisible to the adults in the household.

Importantly, the extent of parent-teenager concordance was not uniform across the population. The researchers used bivariate logistic regression to identify sociodemographic characteristics associated with agreement, and found that concordance of bullying involvement varied by race and Hispanic origin. This finding carries practical weight: if agreement between parent and teenager differs across groups, then surveys that rely exclusively on parent proxy report may distort prevalence comparisons between racial and ethnic groups, potentially obscuring or exaggerating real disparities in bullying exposure.

The study went beyond agreement statistics to ask a deeper question: does it matter, for research on health consequences, who reports the bullying? Bullying victimization and perpetration have been linked in previous work to anxiety, depression, and increased suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and meta-analyses have documented these associations across dozens of studies. The NHIS-Teen team fit logistic regression models relating each of the three bullying measures to health outcomes, once using parent reports and once using teenager reports. The associations pointed in the same direction regardless of who served as the informant, but the magnitude of the associations differed between the two reporting sources, contradicting the hypothesis that parent-reported associations would uniformly be stronger.

That divergence in magnitude matters for how the scientific literature is read. If estimates of the harm associated with bullying shift depending on whether a parent or the teenager supplies the exposure information, then meta-analyses that pool studies mixing informants may carry hidden heterogeneity. More fundamentally, the results suggest that parent proxy reports are not interchangeable with adolescent self-reports, even though parent reports remain common in national child health surveys, largely because young children cannot reliably self-report and because proxy reporting is cheaper and faster to collect.

Why do parents miss so much? Developmental research offers several converging explanations. Adolescents gain increasing autonomy and spend large portions of their day away from parental observation, in classrooms, hallways, buses, and increasingly in online environments where interactions leave no physical trace. Disclosure to parents is voluntary and depends on trust, on the adolescent’s appraisal of whether telling will help, and on fears of escalation or confiscation of devices. Prior studies of children, parents, and teachers, including work in school-based samples, have similarly documented only modest agreement about victimization, with children’s own reports generally capturing more episodes. The present analysis extends that picture to a nationally representative household sample, strengthening the case that the discrepancy is a broad structural feature of how bullying is observed rather than an artifact of any single school or community.

The authors emphasize that their findings do not render parent reports useless. Parent and teenager reports may capture partially overlapping but non-identical constructs: a parent’s report reflects the family’s shared awareness of the child’s social world, which is itself meaningful for intervention, while a teenager’s report reflects lived experience more directly. The concordance statistics quantify the gap between these two vantage points. Weighted kappa in the fair-to-moderate range signals that neither source can stand in for the other without information loss. The authors suggest that future work examine how parent-teenager communication shapes social and emotional health, and whether families with more open communication show higher concordance, turning agreement itself into a potential marker of family functioning.

For policymakers and survey designers, the implications are concrete. National monitoring systems that track bullying solely through parent interviews may understate prevalence and misestimate subgroup differences, weakening the evidence base for school and public health programs. Building direct adolescent self-report into surveillance, as NHIS-Teen does, offers a model: the follow-back design preserves the efficiency of the household survey while recovering the teenage perspective. As bullying increasingly migrates into digital arenas that parents rarely see, the cost of relying on parental observation alone will likely grow, and studies like this one provide the quantitative justification for listening to teenagers directly.

Subject of Research: Parent-teenager concordance in reporting bullying involvement among U.S. adolescents

Article Title: Parent- and Teenager-Reported Concordance of Bullying Involvement in a National Sample of Teenagers

Article References: Ng, A. E., Bottoms-McClain, L., Black, L. I., Zablotsky, B., Bose, J., & Blumberg, S. J. (2026). Parent- and Teenager-Reported Concordance of Bullying Involvement in a National Sample of Teenagers. Journal of Child and Family Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-026-03331-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10826-026-03331-z

Keywords: bullying, cyberbullying, concordance, parent-report, teenager self-report, NHIS-Teen, adolescent health, victimization, perpetration, weighted kappa, Parent-, Teenager-Reported