Who Affects our personality a Mother or Father?
One of the latest researches says that a father's love is
one of the greatest influences on personality development. Most of the people
love their parents and less number of people hate their parents in this world.
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.
"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-authored 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 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 such as these."
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