Ohio State University Study Finds Mothers, not Fathers, Follow their Own Moms Parenting Advice

It is an amazing experience for a new mother to realize just how significant those maternal instincts really are as some parenting skills seem to come naturally.  Although instincts certainly play a critical role in parenting, it could largely be due to the way you were mothered as a child as a new study found that several mothers parent just like their own mums.

Ohio State University Researchers looked at parenting styles across two generations to discover that mothers today follow the same practices their own mothers did.  This, however, did not prove to be true for fathers who do not seem to use their mothers as parenting role models. 

The study looked at how often parents in the 1990’s spanked, showed affection to, and read to their children while comparing the same barometers as to how the parents were treated by their own mothers.  The data came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and the final sample included 1,133 young adult parents. 

For both generations, researchers looked at how often parents praised, showed their child affection, or spanked them in the past week as well as how often they read to their child in the past month. The results revealed that second generation mothers followed closely to what their mothers did.  This was not the same for fathers which surprised researchers but note that dads may have been more influenced by their fathers yet paternal parenting was not examined in this study.

Although mothers followed their own mother’s style, there were significant differences amongst the second generation which may be reflective of broader societal changes.  Of those differences, parents spank their children much less than the previous generation while reading more frequently to their children than they were read to. 

Tags: parenting advice

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Baby Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.