Acceptance, lack of negativity are keys for passing parenting styles on to the next generation

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The children of people who grew up with parental acceptance and lack of negativity tend to struggle less with their own parenting, a new analysis indicates.

The study by researchers at Oregon State University and Utrecht University in The Netherlands also shows that the parenting people experience as young children is more likely to correlate with how they raise their kids than the parenting they receive as teenagers.

The intergenerational connections between parenting are “modest” in the sense that many other factors, such as one’s partner’s behavior, can shape parenting, the researchers say. However, given that practically everyone experiences parenting, and many people become parents, the intergenerational impact is large when considered at a population scale.

Utrecht’s Sanne Geeraerts, a visiting developmental psychology scholar at Oregon State, and David Kerr, a professor of psychology in the OSU College of Liberal Arts, meta-analyzed the results of 24 datasets, encompassing more than 12,000 families, that looked at the parenting of two generations of parents in the same family.

Previous studies of how parenting predicts parenting have shown mixed results, Geeraerts and Kerr say. The meta-analysis combined the results from multiple individual studies to provide a stronger, more reliable answer than any single study could. It also allowed the researchers to examine under which conditions transmission of parenting styles and techniques may be stronger or weaker.

“Especially children who experienced little acceptance, and a lot of negativity, tended to grow up to become parents who also had more difficulty raising children,” Geeraerts said. “Parents don’t necessarily copy the behavior of their own parents – a father who experienced little love from his own parents may be well capable of showing love to his children. But he may struggle more in his parenting, potentially because he missed a good example.”

By focusing on the dimensions of parenting that are most predictive of future-generation parenting, parenting programs may become more effective in breaking intergenerational cycles of suboptimal parenting and in maintaining the solid parenting practices that are already present within families, the authors say.

Another way the research breaks ground, they note, is that the analysis focused on studies conducted at the time the parenting occurred, avoiding some common pitfalls in parenting research.

“The question of intergenerational stability in parenting is difficult to test rigorously,” they said. “Many studies ask adults to remember how they were raised, which is difficult to accurately recall. For example, your current relationship with your parents plays a role in those memories. Our analysis of longitudinal studies avoided those biases. It also included a reasonable number of studies on fathers, which are somewhat rare.”

The authors hope their research can lead to an expanded perspective on the importance of the everyday interactions parents have with their kids.

“Parents are often thinking about a 30-second time horizon,” Kerr said. “How do I encourage or stop this thing happening right now. They are generally not thinking how their pattern of responding cascades across their child’s lifespan, much less across future generations.”

The study was funded by grants from the European Union and the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. Geeraerts finished the study after returning to Utrecht University, where she is now an assistant professor. Co-authors from the University of Amsterdam and the Oregon Social Learning Center also contributed to the research.

Findings were published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.