Do sensitive parents foster kind children, or vice versa? Bidirectional influences between children’s prosocial behavior and parental sensitivity.

Abstract

Bidirectional theories of social development have been around for over 40 years (Bell, 1968), yet they have been applied primarily to the study of antisocial development. In the present study, the reciprocal relationship between parenting behavior and children's socially competent behaviors were examined. Using the National Institute of Child Health and Development Study of Early Child Care data set (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005), bidirectional relationships between parental sensitivity and children's prosocial behavior were modeled using latent variables in structural equation modeling for mothers and fathers, separately. Children and their parents engaged in structured interactions when children were 54-month-olds, 3rd graders, and 5th graders, and these interactions were coded for parental sensitivity. At 3rd, 5th, and 6th grades, teachers and parents reported on children's prosocial behavior. Parental education and child gender were entered as covariates in the models. The results provide support for a bidirectional relationship between children's prosocial behavior and maternal sensitivity (but not paternal sensitivity) in middle childhood. The importance of using a bidirectional approach to examine the development of social competence is emphasized.

Parent–child value similarity in families with young children: The predictive power of prosocial educational goals

“…Our review of the literature yielded a variety of potential transmission mechanisms through which children become similar to their parents, such as the explicit teaching of values, everyday routines and behaviour, the provision of opportunities, shared genes, but also bidirectional and reciprocal processes where children also transmit values to their parents Knafo & Plomin, 2006;Newton et al, 2014;Padilla-Walker et al, 2016;Pastorelli et al, 2016;Uzefovsky et al, 2016). We predicted and found that parents' prosocial educational goals play a key role here.…”

“…Hence, these parents may be particularly good at scaffolding (i.e., at providing helpful and structured learning interactions with the child; Newton et al, 2014;Padilla-Walker et al, 2016) and support their children's understanding of values. As children understand values modelled by their parents particularly well, parent-child value similarity is expected to increase.…”

“…Researching parent-child value similarity, newer studies go beyond transmission from parents to children but find support for bidirectional relationships. For example, not only did a warm and caring parenting style longitudinally predict kindness and prosocial behaviour in children, but also did children's prosocial behaviour predict caring and nurturing parenting (Newton, Laible, Carlo, & Steele, 2014;Pastorelli et al, 2016;see Daniel, Madigan, & Jenkins, 2016 for an overview). The intra-family transmission process may thus be reciprocal (see Newton et al, 2014;Padilla-Walker, Nielson, & Day, 2016): In the above example, the child may internalize the parents' prosocial interactions and become more prosocial.…”

Parental brain‐derived neurotrophic factor genotype, child prosociality, and their interaction as predictors of parents’ warmth

“…However, there is limited knowledge about which specific genes the heritability estimate represents, how the factors that affect warmth interact, how they affect differential parenting, and how they affect fathers, as most of the research to date has been done on mothers. We focused on the genetic and child behavior factors and examined how children's prosocial behavior, which has been shown to elicit positive parenting (Barnett et al., 2012; Newton, Laible, Carlo, Steele, & McGinley, 2014; Padilla‐Walker, Carlo, Christensen, & Yorgason, 2012), may differentially affect paternal and maternal warmth according to the parent's genotype. In other words, we were interested in investigating whether children's prosocial behavior would be more likely to affect certain parents, who may be more sensitive to environmental cues as a result of their genetic makeup.…”

“…While attention has somewhat shifted to include child influences in the study of socialization, most of the focus has been on negative child behaviors. Studies that did examine the bidirectionality of the association between positive parenting and prosocial behavior, have found evidence of child influences (Barnett et al., 2012; Carlo et al., 2011; Newton et al., 2014). Yet, depending on parental characteristics, some parents may be more or less susceptible to their child's behavior.…”