In this paper, we extend a technique due to Romero et al. (Class Quantum Gravity 30:1–13, 2013; Int J Geom Methods Mod Phys 10:1360014, 2013; J Math Anal Appl 419:355–372, 2014) establishing sufficient conditions to guarantee the parabolicity of complete spacelike hypersurfaces immersed in a weighted generalized Robertson–Walker spacetime whose fiber has $$\phi $$ -parabolic universal Riemannian covering. As some applications of this criteria, we obtain uniqueness results concerning spacelike hypersurfaces immersed in spatially weighted generalized Robertson–Walker spacetimes. Furthermore, Calabi–Bernstein type results are also given.