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A long-term study suggests aggressive, defiant, and explosive kindergarten children have experienced tumultuous, negative relationships with their mothers from early on. In the study, reported in PsyhCentral, University of Minnesota researchers studied more than 260 mothers and their children, following them from the children’s birth until first grade.
“Before the study, we thought it was likely the combination of difficult infant temperament and negative parenting that put parent-child pairs most at risk for conflict in the toddler period, and then put the children at risk for conduct problems at school age,” according to lead author Michael F. Lorber, Ph.D., now a research scientist at New York University. “However, our findings suggest that it was negative parenting in early infancy that mattered most.
The researchers found that it was escalating or progressive conflict between moms and their toddlers that predicted later conduct problems — that is, conflict that worsened over time. And in a cyclical pattern, when moms parented their infants negatively, that resulted in their children showing high levels of anger as toddlers, which in turn caused more hostility from the moms. Additionally, moms who parented their infants negatively also may have had angrier kids because these moms were more hostile toward their toddlers.
Negative parenting in infancy appeared to set the stage for both moms and their kids to be more hostile and angry during the toddler years, bringing out the worst in one another.
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