Children influence their parents, as well as the other way around, a phenomenon called “bidirectional parenting“:
One large study looking at bidirectional parenting and featuring over 1,000 children and their parents, concluded that the child’s behaviour had a much stronger influence on their parents’ behaviour than the other way around. Parents and their children were interviewed at age eight and again over the subsequent five years. Parental control, the study found, did not change a child’s behaviour, but a child’s behavioural problems led to less parental warmth and more control.
Research also shows that when children demonstrate challenging behaviour, parents may withdraw or use a more authoritarian (strict and cold) parenting style.
Similarly, parents of adolescents with behavioural issues act with less warmth and more hostility. The opposite occurs for adolescents who show good behaviour: their parents behave with more warmth over time. This reveals that it’s not harsh parenting that predicts behavioural problems, says Shaffer, but rather, “children who act out, who are oppositional, who are defiant, have parents who respond by increasing the harshness of their parenting”.
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“Genetic influence affects virtually every measurable trait,” explains Nancy Segal who specialises in twin studies at California State University, Fullerton and is author of Deliberately Divided. For instance, a 2015 meta-analysis (a study of studies) looking at a combined total of 14 million twin pairs, either growing up together or raised apart, found that identical twins raised apart were more alike than fraternal twins raised in the same home.
This confirmed what Segal had long noticed among twins she had met — that “shared environments do not make family members alike”, she says. It’s why she often says that parents of one child are environmentalists, whilst parents of two are geneticists, because the latter quickly realise that two children raised in the same home can behave in completely different ways.
So, what are parents for again?
Bottle of mine, it’s you that I’ve always wanted / Bottle of mine, ever since I was first decanted
“One large study looking at bidirectional parenting and featuring over 1,000 children and their parents, concluded that the child’s behaviour had a much stronger influence on their parents’ behaviour than the other way around.”
This is one of those silly studies where they go on and on about nonsense.
It’s not that the children “changed” the parents it’s that the children misbehaved so the parents had to show a different side of their behavior which is not the same as changing them at all.