Fathers who yell at their adolescent children provoke more aggressive, less cooperative behavior out of the kids, according to new research.
“Our findings challenge ‘Wait till your father gets home’ attitudes that traditionally position dads as the lead disciplinarians when children grow older,” writes the study’s lead author, Laura Padilla-Walker, associate professor in Brigham Young University’s family life department, in a Child and Family blog post.
The study, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, videotaped 500 children ages 13-15 during separate interactions with their moms and dads. When fathers showed hostility toward their children — shouting, criticizing, name-calling — the children grew more aggressive and less helpful toward other family members and strangers.
“Not being helpful might not seem such a serious thing compared to, say, drug use or delinquency,” Padilla-Walker writes. “But other research shows that having helpful attitudes at home provides wider benefits for teenagers, protecting them from becoming generally aggressive and delinquent, as well as from deviant behavior later in life.”
Boys are often trained to believe anger is the only acceptable emotion, Padilla-Walker writes, and many of them carry that approach to fatherhood. But anger can backfire when applied to kids who are misbehaving.
Better to be firm, she said, not hostile.
“It is totally appropriate for parents to have reasonable expectations for their children, and consequences if the children do not meet these expectations,” Padilla-Walker told me. “That does not necessitate yelling, belittling, name-calling or shaming — all of which are examples of verbal hostility.”
Interestingly, mothers who showed hostility toward their children didn’t have the same effect.
“My guess is that it’s about the overall quality of the relationship,” Padilla-Walker said. “Research suggests that if you have a good relationship with your children, mistakes made as a parent have less of an effect. Mothers had slightly higher warmth than fathers in this study, and we didn’t assess overall relationships quality. But if fathers are more distant and don’t have a strong relationship with children, then instances of hostility will be interpreted more negatively by children.”
I’m sure the study will elicit its fair share of “Back in my day … ” criticism from folks who remember hostile, disciplinarian dads who ruled the roost. But Padilla-Walker said the research calls for an evolution in parenting roles and relationships.
“We have a sizable body of research suggesting that parental harsh control and excessive discipline is not effective, and in many cases harmful,” she said. “Fathers of the past were seen as a shadowy presence for their children. Today I believe we are doing a better job of helping fathers to see that they matter and that they need to be engaged in the lives of their children more than just (disciplining them).”
It makes sense to me that a kid who’s made to feel small — through name-calling or shouting — would turn around and look for ways to feel big again, which would explain the mistreatment of other family members and strangers.
As frustrating as it is to deal with an unruly teen, I hope we can take a look at the evidence showing that mentally beating them down is very likely teaching them just one thing: how to do the same to others.
