A classic answer to the "what stirred development to the wrong track" question, is parenting; Why am I so anxious? My parents did not love me enough. Why am I violent? My parents were not strict enough. Why am I an overachiever? My parents put a lot of emphasis on grades. Why am I insecure? My parents did not give me enough compliments. Citing parenting style as the all-inclusive cause for how children turn out is a popular stance, even among professionals. The problem with this view is that it does not consider the child as an influencing factor.
Imagine lighting striking you, or tripping on a rock and breaking your wrist, or even something as small as a mosquito biting you. We tend to ascribe such incidents to pure bad luck and view them as environmental mishaps. But even these seemingly random events may be genetically induced. How can genes affect anything other than the body in which they reside? By affecting an individual's behavior, which in turn will affect his/her surrounding environment. For example, a genetic propensity for risk taking may lead you to spend your time outside in spite of a nasty blizzard that is roaming the streets, thus increasing your chances of being struck by lightning; you may have low bone strength due to a genetic proclivity and be at a higher risk for fractures; or you may be explorative and curious, and like to travel to exotic places which happen to be swarming with mosquitoes. Similarly, parenting is an environment that can be influenced by the child's genetics. Although psychologists were able to recognize the effect of the child's temperament on parenting many years ago, it is an effect that has mostly been ignored.
Much of previous research has relied solely on associations between parents' and children's behaviors to support the assumption that parents affect children. For example, research demonstrating that warm parents tend to have children with high levels of self-control would have been interpreted as an effect of parental warmth on the child's level of self-control. But, who is to say that the child's high level of self-control does not lead the parent to be more affectionate? Will the same parent behave similarly with a child that has low self-control? Indeed, establishing causation in a relationship is a challenging task: it is difficult to determine who affects whom in ongoing interactions. This naturally applies to children and their parents as well. Children are already born with genetic and environmental (the environment in the womb) baggage. So from the moment they are born they influence their relationship with their parents. One means of disentangling the 'who affects whom' conundrum is incorporating genetic methods and show that the child’s genes affect the way the parent behaves. This translates to showing that the genes of the child affect a behavior that in turn affects the parent.
Parenting as a reaction to the child's genotype
In the current review I will focus on what is termed "evocative gene-environment correlation" (evocative rGE; Plomin, DeFries, & Loehlin, 1977; Scarr & McCartney, 1983). Evocative rGE refers to instances in which a child's behavior that is affected by his/her genes, elicits certain reactions from the environment. For example, there may be an association between child aggression and harsh parenting. It would be easy to assume that harsh discipline leads the child to be aggressive, while the reverse may also be true. The reverse may be shown by linking the child's genes that predispose him/her to behave aggressively with harsh parenting. In such a case, the established path of causation will be: genes that affect aggressionchild aggressionharsh parenting. Notably, this does not exclude the possibility that harsh parenting affects child aggression; rather, it supports the claim that the child-parent relationship is bidirectional.
Evocative rGE processes mean that parenting is not context-independent. It happens within a relationship between two individuals who are both affecting the relationship and are affected by it. This point seems straightforward enough and yet parents, children, and even many researchers still appear to think of parenting as unidirectional, as if there were an ideal style of parenting that would produce the ideal child, regardless of the child. The conceptualization of the child as a participant in his or her development challenges the traditional unidirectional view of socialization and calls for theories that conceptualize parents and their children within a bidirectional relationship. The idea that some children might be genetically predisposed to evoke negative responses in their parents has been treated as scandalous, because to most identifying the cause equates to identifying the guilty party. But this is a fallacy. The so-called "cause" does not always have to lead to the same outcome. If parents and therapists become more aware of the cycle of influence in parent-child relationships, they will be more successful at changing it for the better; i.e., identifying the cause will make identifying the remedy possible.
To what extent does the child's genotype affect parenting?
A child-based twin design can be used to assess whether monozygotic/identical (MZ) twins are treated more similarly by their parents than dizygotic/non-identical (DZ) twins. If MZs are in fact treated more similarly, it indicates that genetics are at play. It indicates that the genes that make MZs alike also make their parents treat them similarly (Neiderhiser et al., 2004). Various child-based twin studies have shown that children affect the parenting they experience (Avinun & Knafo, 2014). Additionally, as children grow older their evocative effect on parents grows stronger (Elkins, McGue, & Iacono, 1997). This makes sense, because as children grow older they gain independence and show their personality more freely, which in turn can lead to a larger effect on parenting.
How does the child's genotype affect parenting?
Studies have also examined specific child behaviors that may affect parenting. For instance, the same genetic factors that predispose 5-month-old infants to be fussy, also lead them to elicit more negative behaviors from their mothers (Boivin et al., 2005). In other words, mothers of difficult and fussy infants are more likely to show anger toward them, than mothers whose infants are easier to handle. Another study focused on mother-reported physical punishment and maltreatment in 5-year-old twins living in England and Wales (Jaffee et al., 2004). Results showed that the same genetic factors that predispose children to antisocial behavior also predispose them to experience higher levels of physical punishment from their parents. Maltreatment, however, did not depend on the child's behavior. Thus aggressive and oppositional behavior of children evoked more frequent physical punishment. Notably, these findings do not legitimize physical punishment. Rather, they stress the importance of fully understanding the factors that underlie parenting, to enable conscious parental responses that will break negative child-parent reaction cycles.
Another way to examine evocative rGE is to study adoptive families. Adoptions enable us to discern the difference between heritable (biological parents) and environmental (e.g., adoptive parents) effects on the adoptee's behavior. For example, Ge et al. (1996) showed that adoptive parents' parental behavior was associated with the adoptees’ biological parents' psychiatric status. This association was mediated by the adoptees’ behavior. Specifically, adoptees born to parents with psychopathologies were more hostile and antisocial and as a reaction their adoptive parents used harsh discipline more, and were less nurturing and involved (see also O'Connor, Deater-Deckard, Fulker, Rutter, & Plomin, 1998). One interpretation of these findings is that having genes of parents with psychopathologies affects the adoptees' behavior negatively, which in turn affects adoptive parents' parenting.
The effect of the child's characteristics was also shown in a study that examined the home environment of 24-month-old toddlers (Saudino & Plomin, 1997). Observational methods and questionnaires were used in order to estimate the emotional and verbal responsivity of the mother, her involvement, avoidance of restriction, organization of the child's environment, provision of appropriate toys and stimulation. The results demonstrated that the genetic factors that influence the toddlers' attention characteristics, such as: attention span, persistence and goal directedness, also influence maternal involvement (child's genes child's attention characteristics maternal involvement and responsivity). Hence, parents appear to respond to the first buds of their toddler's personality. Interestingly, the child's attention characteristics did not seem to affect the home environment 12 months before, when children were one year old. Parents may need time in order to develop a clearer picture of their infant's attentional attributes and adjust the environment accordingly.
Are all parents similarly affected by children's behaviors?
Just like different children evoke different responses from parents, different parents react differently to the same child behavior. Indeed, research indicates that the interplay between children's and parents' characteristics can produce unique contexts for development. Infant's irritability (assessed when infants were 10 days old) was associated with postnatal depression at two-months in high-risk mothers (Murray, Stanley, Hooper, King, & Fiori-Cowley, 1996). Mothers were rated as being at high-risk for postnatal depression based on a predictive index that included questions regarding the experience of pregnancy, previous mood disorder and the quality of close relationships. When these vulnerable mothers had irritable infants they were more likely to fall into depression.
Furthermore, having an infant with poor motor functioning (i.e., poor quality of movement and activity level rated as either hypo- or hyper-aroused) increases the likelihood of postnatal depression in both low- and high-risk mothers. One suggested explanation for this pervasive effect was that these infants are less responsive to parental attention, which limits opportunities for satisfying and rewarding parent-infant interactions. In contrast with poor motor functioning, fussing and crying, although frustrating, may still be seen as attempts of the infant to communicate various needs, and consequently be treated with more understanding and patience by mothers who have the emotional resources to do so. The study demonstrates how the effect of the child on the parent can be conditional. Irritable infants require more attention, and the question is whether their caregivers have the resources to handle the additional challenge they present
A study that also demonstrated this point examined the effect of maternal self-efficacy on the link between infants' behavior and parenting (Leerkes & Crockenberg, 2002). Self-efficacy is defined as the belief in one’s ability to achieve a desired outcome. Contrary to self-esteem it is not a global evaluation of the self, but rather an evaluation regarding a specific ability. The results of the study showed that infant distress to limitations (e.g., not being able to reach a desired item) had a negative impact on maternal sensitivity (how the mother reacted to her infant's cues), but only when maternal self-efficacy was low. It is possible that low self-efficacy causes the mother to be less persistent when encountering a difficult task like a frustrated (and frustrating…), crying infant (Leerkes & Crockenberg, 2002). It is easy to imagine how parents who already doubt their parenting skills would feel after failing to soothe their infant. The failure in reaching the desired goal of a relaxed and quiet infant exacerbates the feeling of incompetence. These contingent influences of the child stress yet again the bidirectional facet of parent-child interactions. Children's effects are not independent of their parents' characteristics.
Do children influence parents only through their behavior?
Children may affect the parenting style they experience even without doing anything. It may be thought that all parents view their children as beautiful and that they will not be affected by their children's looks. However, research findings burst that bubble by showing that parenting is affected by the attractiveness of the child (Langlois, Ritter, Casey, & Sawin, 1995). Mothers of newborn attractive infants were more affectionate (e.g., held the baby close, touched and patted the baby, kept eye contact with the baby) and less engaged in routine caregiving such as burping, cleaning and wiping.
Sex, a factor that children cannot control (adults have some more liberty in the matter), also affects parenting styles. Parents treat boys and girls differently from the very beginning (Witt, 1997). Girls are dressed in colors that are perceived as "girlish" (e.g., pink), and boys are dressed in colors that are perceived as "boyish" (e.g., blue), their rooms are decorated differently, and they are given different toys. Girls are usually brought up to be nurturing and thus they are provided with dolls and encouraged to pretend being mothers. Boys are usually brought up to develop mechanical orientations, so their social environment buys them robots and cars, and they are also encouraged to be tough, and perhaps even aggressive, thus they are provided with weapons and soldiers to play with.
Psychological research has been showing for decades that parental beliefs and attitudes towards gender have an enormous impact on the way they treat their children. Children constantly receive gender-differentiating messages from society as a whole, and also from parents. For example, even when there are no differences between boys and girls in grades or interest in science, parents still tend to treat them differently: fathers of boys use more cognitively demanding speech during a physics task, parents of boys are more likely to believe their child is interested in science, and parents of girls are more likely to believe that science is difficult for their child (Tenenbaum & Leaper, 2003). Furthermore, sons tend to describe both their parents as more permissive, possibly reflecting that parents are more protective of daughters (McKinney & Renk, 2008). In addition, studies show that boys tend to receive more harsh parenting in comparison with girls, less parental sympathy and empathic concern and more corporal punishment (Jenkins, Rasbash, & O'Connor, 2003; Lytton & Romney, 1991).
Conclusions
There is not, and there cannot be, a universally ideal parenting style. Regardless of the fact that the same style of parenting can have a different effect in different cultures, children are different. It is therefore fairly obvious that they would require different parenting approaches. Raising the awareness of parents to the way their children can trigger certain behaviors in them can help them control their reactions. Video feedback interventions can help with that, by helping parents notice how they react to their child. Consequently, they may be able to adjust their parenting in a way that will be more suitable to their child. Experts need to understand that even if parents behave according to a certain cultural ideal, it does not mean that they are behaving in a way that is ideal to their unique child. Advice givers should come to the same understanding – you need to have the whole unique picture of the parent and the child to give proper advice. This means that whenever parents seek help for something that involves parenting it might be preferable to go to treatments that include the child as well.
The fact that children affect parenting, taken together with other findings showing that different children respond differently to the same parenting style, stress the importance of tailor-made/personalized parenting. Similar to the creation of personalized medicine which followed the realization that we are all born different, personalized parenting should be advocated and generalized self-help parenting books should be read with a grain of salt.
References
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