Being a parent requires one to be watchful of what is said and how one acts when children are present. Children are like sponges; they seem to have an ability to pick up on every little word and cue an adult is saying. This heightened sense of discernment equips a child to interpret meaning from body language, voice tone and level of animation in speech.
Parents come in all personality types that influence their social interaction and behaviors. So, depending on the type of personality traits a parent may have could affect your child’s life in ways you may not consider.
I was reading a German study recently that has been ongoing since 1984. It involved 9,400 children aged 11-17, along with their parents, which took a closer look into how parents’ personality traits influenced their kids.
How can a parents’ personality shape the lives of their children?
The study was co-authored by Joshua Jackson, at the Saul and Louis Rosenzweig Associate Professor in Personality Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Jackson and his research team, led by graduate student, Amanda Wright explored how parents’ personalities – “reserved or boisterous, agreeable, cranky, concerned or care-free can shape the lives of their children, for better or worse.”
The findings were recently published in Infant and Child Development. The survey took into account different aspects of their children’s lives like, overall health, school grades, time spent on leisure activities outside and including watching TV and playing on phone, alcohol and cigarette use and family argument frequency.
Big Five Parent Personality Traits
The study looked at: Agreeableness – getting along with others or degree of cooperation.
Openness: as it relates to imagination and creativity.
Consciousness: describes level of carefulness and organization.
Extraversion: relates to a person’s energy and outgoingness.
Neurotic people were seen to be more worried, nervous and prone to anxiety.
The Main Results
First, they factored into account the child’s personality and concluded yes, a parents’ personality had a significant impact on their child’s life.
In short, the higher a parent scored on degree of agreeableness or conscientiousness traits, the healthier their child. The likelihood of the child to remain active in hobbies were linked to how their parent scored in openness.
Also, children with more extraverted parents had lower grade scores. The kids with neurotic parents were affected in several categories including, lacking grade scores and health, body mass index (BMI), and more time spent in leisure activities.
All in all, the study indicated that the parents’ personality had a major impact on their child’s life. The data was inconclusive in that it couldn’t make concrete determinations as to why for example, an extroverted parent had children with lower grades. Were parents too busy to help with their homework or did they encourage more social activities instead of studies?
Parent Personality Most Associated with Successful Kids
For the most part, kids whose parents had personalities traits high in extroversion, agreeableness, conscientious and open generally did very well in life. As long as the parent scored lower in the neuroticism category. Although, the kids with more extroverted parents did tend to have lower grades.
Best Parent- Child personality Combinations
In most families, the parent-child relationship can be very strong creating a special personal synergistic bond. According to this study, the one personality combination that revealed least amount of disagreement and frequency of arguments, were when both the parents and child scored high marks in agreeability.
Arguments were drastically reduced when both parents and children were more agreeable.
Also noted families with both non-neurotic parents and children had kids with the highest grades.
But neurotic children with neurotic parents had the highest BMI scores.
How the Childs Personality Traits Factored
We can see how the parents’ personality can play a major role in their child’s life. But how about the child’s personality alone?
As it turns out, they found the kids with the best grades were extraverted, agreeable, conscientious and open. Those with the lowest grades were those kids who were neurotic. Yet, the more extroverted kids were more likely to smoke and drink. The opposite effect was seen in the kids who were more agreeable, open and conscientious.
Realationship of Kids having the Same Personality Traits as Their Parents
As children grow up, parents often feel and see how their kids can become clones of themselves. But according to research, this connection is not so determined in terms of personality. Many children within the same family can have a completely different type of personality. If you have siblings, think of your brother or sister and you can see how someone may be more introverted or extroverted than one another, for example.
So, personality is not determined by parents as much as we think, but behaviors can change.
Personality vs Behavior
What they found is that personalities are pretty much set into who you are and not what you become. Parent personality traits can only do so much in relationship to affect a child’s behavior and habits. Introverts remain introverted just as much as extroverts don’t dramatically change into shy and reserved people.
What can change and develop is a child’s behavior. Being exposed to a positive, healthy family environment, one which provides the necessary ingredients to encourage growth through social exchange, communication directed towards teachable moments, praise and reward incentive-based activities, a healthy diet and physical activity, can all add to increase the odds of raising a healthy child. So, conscientious parents make healthy kids.
Being a successful parent is a tiresome and very difficult job. One whose success is measured by how productive, considerate, loving and principled their children become. So when they grow up, they can continue the cycle.
Most parents would give the world to their kids if they could, but they can’t. Somethings are just out of the scope of possibilities, like their own personality. A parents’ personality traits can be an advantage or a hinderance when raising children. In either case, you don’t get to choose. But the one fundamental truth for all parents is, that you need to be a grown up yourself to raise any type of child.
-A Balanced Brain is a Better Brain for a Happier Life-