Be a Loving father in Nurturing your Child!

A father's love contributes as much and sometimes more to a child's development as does a mother's love. That is one of many findings in a new large-scale analysis of research about the "power of parental rejection and acceptance in shaping our personalities as children and into adulthood".
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"In our half-century of international research, we've not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent effect on personality and personality development as does the experience of rejection, especially by parents in childhood," says Ronald Rohner of the University of Connecticut, co-author of the new study in Personality and Social Psychology Review.

"Children and adults everywhere -- regardless of differences in race, culture, and gender -- tend to respond in exactly the same way when they perceived themselves to be rejected by their parents, caregivers and other attachment figures."
Looking at 36 studies from around the world that together involved more than 10,000 participants, Rohner and co-author Abdul Khaleque found that in response to rejection by their parents, children tend to feel more anxious and insecure, as well as more hostile and aggressive toward others.

The pain of rejection -- especially when it occurs over a period of time in childhood -- tends to linger into adulthood, making it more difficult for adults who were rejected as children to form secure and trusting relationships with their intimate partners. The studies are based on surveys of children and adults about their parents' degree of acceptance or rejection during their childhood, coupled with questions about their personality dispositions.

Moreover, Rohner says, emerging evidence from the past decade of research in psychology and neuroscience is revealing that the same parts of the brain are activated when people feel rejected as are activated when they experience physical pain. "Unlike physical pain, however, people can psychologically re-live the emotional pain of rejection over and over for years," Rohner says.

When it comes to the impact of a father's love versus that of a mother, results from more than 500 studies suggest that while children and adults often experience more or less the same level of acceptance or rejection from each parent, the influence of one parent's rejection -- oftentimes the father's -- can be much greater than the other's. A 13-nation team of psychologists working on the International Father Acceptance Rejection Project has developed at least one explanation for this difference: that children and young adults are likely to pay more attention to whichever parent they perceive to have higher interpersonal power or prestige. So if a child perceives her father as having higher prestige, he may be more influential in her life than the child's mother. Work is ongoing to better understand this potential relationship.

One important take-home message from all this research, Rohner says, is that fatherly love is critical to a person's development. The importance of a father's love should help motivate many men to become more involved in nurturing child care. Additionally, he says, widespread recognition of the influence of fathers on their children's personality development should help reduce the incidence of "mother blaming" common in schools and clinical setting. "The great emphasis on mothers and mothering in America has led to an inappropriate tendency to blame mothers for children's behavior problems and maladjustment when, in fact, fathers are often more implicated than mothers in the development of problems with these children".

Source: ScienceDaily (12th June, 2012)

Do you want to help your children?

Dear Parents!
Do you want to help ensure your children turn out to be happy, composed and socially well adjusted?
Then Bond with them when they are infants!

This is the message from a study by the University of Iowa, which found that infants who have a close, intimate relationship with a parent are less likely to be troubled, aggressive or experience other emotional and behavioral problems when they reach their school age. 

Surprisingly, the researchers found that a young child needs to feel particularly secure with only one parent to reap the benefits of stable emotions and behavior, and that being attached to dad is just as helpful as being close to mom.

The study bolsters the still-debated role of the influence that a parent can exercise at the earliest stages in a child's mental and emotional development, the authors contend in the paper, published in the journal Child Development.

"There is a really important period when a mother or a father should form a secure relationship with their child, and that is during the first two years of life. That period appears to be critical to the child's social and emotional development," says Sanghag Kim, a post-doctoral researcher in psychology at the UI who collaborated with UI psychology professor Grazyna Kochanska on the study. "At least one parent should make that investment."

The researchers assessed the relationship of 102 infants (15 months old) with a parent and then followed up with 86 of them when they reached age 8. Separate surveys of the parents and the child were taken at that time. The infants and parents were drawn from a broad spectrum of income, education, and race. All the couples were heterosexual.

The authors also solicited feedback from teachers about the children, which ranged from concerns about inner emotions, such as worry or sadness, to more outward displays, such as disobedience and aggression. Interestingly, the children's reports and their teachers' impressions were similar; yet they differed, sometimes greatly, from the parents' evaluations.














"Parents and teachers have different perspectives," Kim explains. "They observe children in different contexts and circumstances. That is why we collected data from many informants who know the child."

The researchers were surprised to find out that infants who had felt attached to both parents did not enjoy additional mental and emotional advantages into childhood, compared to those who had been close to one parent. The UI psychologists' best explanation is that a warm, secure, and positive bond with at least one primary caregiver may be enough to meet the child's need for security and to provide a solid foundation for development.

Other studies have contended that being secure with both parents can have additional advantages; this study, however, checked in with the children when they were older and their outcomes could be more fully measured than those surveyed in previous work, the Iowa researchers said.

The study appears to be good news for single mothers and stay-at-home dads, two marked parenting shifts that are defining this generation. Kim says the study shows that either parent can serve as a secure, attachment figure for the infant, thus providing the closeness and support to promote the child's healthy emotional growth.

"Some people think the father is not good enough to be the primary caregiver," says Kim, who earned his doctorate in sociology at the UI last year. "Our data show otherwise."

The study did not directly sample single mothers, as all families included two parents. Still, the finding that one parent can provide the tight bond and emotional dividends as two parents "is a good sign," Kim says, that should be studied further.

On the other end, the study showed that infants who had not felt secure with either parent were more likely to report worries, fears, and aggression when they reached their school age. 

Source: ScienceDaily (11th Oct 2012)