How kids shape their parents ’ parenting style

By Christian Jarrett In our culture we like to speculate about the effects of different parenting styles on children. A lot of this debate is wasted breath. Twin studies – that compare similarities in outcomes between genetically identical and non-identical twins raised by their biological or adopted parents – have already shown us that parental influence is far more modest than we usually assume. Now a paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science goes further, using the twin approach to reveal how it is mistaken to see the parent-child dynamic as a one-way relationship. “Given the current evidence … it is more accurate to conceptualise parenting as a transactional process in which both parents and children exert simultaneous and continuous influence on each other,” write Mona Ayoub at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her colleagues. Ayoub’s team used data from the Texas Twin Project, including parents’ ratings of their parenting style (specifically, their warmth and stress levels in relation to each child), and the children’s ratings of their own personality traits based on a kids’ version of the Big Five personality test. In all there were 497 identical twin pairs in the study, 480 same-sex non-identical twin pairs, and 434 opposite-sex twins, and their average age was 13. The logic underlying the researchers’ approach was that if children affect their parents’ parenting style via their...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Genetics Personality Source Type: blogs