Genetic and Environmental Associations Between Child Personality and Parenting

Abstract

Parenting is often conceptualized in terms of its effects on offspring. However, children may also play an active role in influencing the parenting they receive. Simple correlations between parenting and child outcomes may be due to parent-to-child causation, child-to-parent causation, or some combination of the two. We use a multirater, genetically informative, large sample ( n = 1,411 twin sets) to gain traction on this issue as it relates to parental warmth and stress in the context of child Big Five personality. Considerable variance in parental warmth (27%) and stress (45%) was attributable to child genetic influences on parenting. Incorporating child Big Five personality into the model roughly explained half of this variance. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that parents mold their parenting in response to their child’s personality. Residual heritability of parenting is likely due to child characteristics beyond the Big Five.

The Heritability of Self-Control: a Meta-Analysis

“…of shared environmental influences does not mean that parents do not play a role in the development of self-control of their children (Ayoub et al, 2018;Engelhardt et al, 2018). Rather, it implies that environmental factors that make individuals dissimilar play a more important role, such as individual perceptions of parenting that make twins dissimilar even though they are raised within the same family (Cecil et al, 2012;Hannigan et al, 2016).…”

Social Support and Modelling in Relation to Physical Activity Participation and Outdoor Play in Preschool Children

“…First, the data are cross-sectional and do not allow for the analysis of causal relationships. Therefore, we do not know the direction of the relationships found, and it is also possible that the physical activity behavior of the children influenced the social environment instead of the other way around [13,51]. Second, all data was captured from proxy reports and is prone to bias.…”

Human evolution and culture in relationship to shame in the parenting role: Implications for psychology and psychotherapy

“…Gopnik () points out that ‘parenting’ indicates a desire or goal to turn the child into ‘something’, and there is some kind of outcome to be achieved, which is one‐directional. Indeed, parenting is often conceptualized in terms of influencing the child; however, recent work is finding that children play an active role in influencing the parenting they receive, with personality factors of the child playing a large role as to whether they receive parental warmth or hostility (Ayob et al ., ). In contrast, the term ‘being a parent’ emphasizes the process of care and what one can do to nurture the child (Gopnik, ), which is a bi‐directional or transactional relationship between parent and child (Karraker & Coleman, ), where both influence each other.…”