PARENTAL ATTITUDES AND CHILD ADJUSTMENT

Abstract

Many contemporary personality theories attach great importance to the role parents play in determining the personality characteristics of children. Such emphasis is wisely placed. The primacy, the intimacy, and the extensive protraction of parental influences are likely to render them crucial to the formation of personality tendencies among children. In view of these considerations, there is a clear need for research in which important aspects of parental influence are examined, the behavior of children concurrently appraised, and relationships between the two sets of variables determined. It is neither possible nor necessary to review here the mountainous literature on parent-child relationships which has emerged over the past 30 years, but certain remarks concerning that literature can and should be made. A good deal of it consists of expert advice whose content changes with fashion (13) and whose factual basis is obscure. Much of the rest is theory, which is sometimes a product of keen observation and closely reasoned thought, but which is seldom buttressed by carefully gathered, rigorously evaluated empirical data. There remain a number of excellent investigations on parent-child relationships, among which the works of Radke (Io), Baldwin and his collaborators (3, 4), and Sears et al. (12) seem particularly outstanding, but it is no disparagement of these and similar studies to note that they leave large areas of the domain almost entirely untouched. A major hiatus exists, for example, in regard to the attitudes of fathers and their part in the formation of personality tendencies among children. A re