Greatly Influences Child’s Personality Development
Afather’s love contributes as much – and sometimes more – to a child’s personality development as does a mother’s love, researchers have found. That is one of many findings in a new large-scale analysis of research about the power of
parental rejection and acceptance in shaping our personalities as children and into adulthood. In our half-century of international research, we have not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent effect on
personality and personality development as does the experience of rejection, especially by parents in childhood,” said Ronald Rohner of the University of Connecticut, coauthored the new study in Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Children and adults everywhere – regardless of differences in race, culture, and gender – tend to respond in exactly the same way when they perceived themselves to be rejected by their caregivers and other attachment figures, he explained.
Looking at 36 studies from around the world that together involved more than 10,000 participants, Rohner and co-author Abdul Khaleque found that in response to rejection by their parents, children tend to feel more anxious and insecure, as
well as more hostile and aggressive toward others.
The pain of rejection especially when it occurs over a period of time in childhood – tends to linger into adulthood,making it more difficult for adults who were rejected as children to form secure and trusting relationships with their
intigreatly influences child’s personality development mate partners. The studies are based on surveys of children and adults about their parents’ degree of acceptance or rejection during their childhood, coupled with questions about their
personality dispositions.
Moreover, Rohner said, emerging evidence from the past decade of research in psychology and neuroscience is revealing that the same parts of the brain are activated when people feel rejected as are activated when they experience physical
pain. Unlike physical pain, however, people can psychologically re-live the emotional pain of rejection over and over for years,” stated Rohner. When it comes to the impact of a father’s love versus that of a mother, results from more than
500 studies suggest that while children and adults often experience more or less the same level of acceptance or rejection from each parent, the influence of one parent’s rejection — often the fathers — can be much greater than the others.
Many studies revealed that children and young adults are likely to pay more attention to whichever parent they perceive to have higher interpersonal power or prestige. So if a child perceives her father as having higher prestige, he may be
more influential in her life than the child’s mother. Work is ongoing to better understand this potential relationship. One important takehome message from all this research, Rohner noted, is that fatherly love is critical to a persons
development.
The importance of a father’s love should help motivate many men to become more involved in nurturing childcare. Additionally, he said, widespread recognition of the influence of father’s on their children’s personality development should
help reduce the incidence of “mother blaming” common in schools and clinical setting. The great emphasis on mothers and mothering in America has led to an inappropriate tendency to blame mothers for children’s behavior problems and
maladjustment when, in fact, fathers are often more implicated than mothers in the development of problems such as these.
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