This article summarizes concepts, methods, cross‐cultural evidence, and implications of parental acceptance‐rejection theory (PARTheory). The theory focuses primarily on parental love—its expressions, impact, and origins. Nearly 2,000 studies in the United States and cross‐culturally confirm the widely held belief that children everywhere need acceptance (love) from parents and other attachment figures. Evidence has shown that when this need is not met, children worldwide—regardless of variations in culture, gender, age, or ethnicity—tend to self‐report a specific form of psychological maladjustment. Additionally, individuals who perceive themselves to be rejected appear to be more disposed than accepted persons to develop behavior problems, depression or depressed affect, substance abuse, and other mental health‐related issues. Finally, children and adults appear universally to organize their perceptions of acceptance‐rejection around the same four classes of behavior. These include warmth/affection (or coldness/lack of affection), hostility/aggression, indifference/neglect, and undifferentiated rejection.

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ࡗ Perceived Parental Acceptance-Rejection and Psychological Adjustment: A Meta-Analysis of Cross- Cultural and Intracultural StudiesMeta-analytic procedures were used to pool information from 43 studies worldwide to test one of the major postulates of parental acceptancerejection theory (PARTheory). Specifically, using child and adult versions of the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ) and the Personality Assessment Questionnaire (PAQ), these studies allowed us to assess the claim within PARTheory's personality subtheory that perceived parental acceptance-rejection is associated universally with a specific form of psychological (mal)adjustment among children and adults, regardless of differences in gender, race, geography, language, or culture. Results of the analysis showed that the predicted relation emerged without exception in all studies. The mean weighted effect sizes across the full range of sociocultural and ethnic groups studied were r ϭ .51 for children and r ϭ .46 for adults. Analysis of fail safe N showed that 3,433 additional studies, all with nonsignificant results, would be required to disconfirm the pancultural association between the PARQ and PAQ among children; 941 such studies would be required to disconfirm this relation among adults.

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This article explores the cultural construction of fatherhood in America, as well as the consequences of this construction as a motivator for understudying fathers—especially father love—for nearly a century in developmental and family research. It then reviews evidence from 6 categories of empirical studies showing the powerful influence of fathers’ love on children's and young adults’ social, emotional, and cognitive development and functioning. Much of this evidence suggests that the influence of father love on offspring's development is as great as and occasionally greater than the influence of mother love. Some studies conclude that father love is the sole significant predictor of specific outcomes after controlling for the influence of mother love. Overall, father love appears to be as heavily implicated as mother love in offsprings’ psychological well-being and health, as well as in an array of psychological and behavioral problems.