Do Australian parents of young children understand what bullying means?

School bullying is a global phenomenon and parents play a key role in supporting young children and reducing bullying incidents. Parents’ understanding of bullying will influence the way they respond to the behaviour, so it is important to know what parents believe bullying to be. A total of 201 Australian parents of young children between the ages of 5 and 10 participated in an online survey to define bullying and fighting in their own words and identify the differences between the two behaviours. Parents were also presented with 20 scenarios that depicted five traditional bullying behaviours, five cyberbullying behaviours, five non-bullying face-to-face behaviours and five non-cyberbullying behaviours and asked to identify whether these behaviours were bullying or not bullying. The results showed that these parents described some of the attributes which researchers define as bullying such as, the intention to harm, a power difference and repetition but they were unable to define clearly the differences between bullying and fighting. The vast majority of parents recognised when the scenario was describing bullying behaviour however, some parents classified fighting and even playful behaviour as bullying in the scenarios that did not show bullying behaviours. Implications for supporting parents understanding of bullying are discussed.