Clues to Young Children's Aggressive Behavior Uncovered by New Study

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111026091227.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2011) — Children who are persistently aggressive, defiant, and explosive by the time they're in kindergarten very often have tumultuous relationships with their parents from early on. A new longitudinal study suggests that a cycle involving parenting styles and hostility between mothers and toddlers is at play.

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"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 Michael F. Lorber, a research scientist at New York University and lead author of the paper (Lorber was previously at the University of Minnesota). "However, our findings suggest that it was negative parenting in early infancy that mattered most." Negative parenting occurred when parents expressed negative emotions toward their children, handled them roughly, and so forth.

The researchers also found that it was conflict between moms and their toddlers that predicted later conduct problems in the children -- and not just a high level of conflict, but 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.

By the same token, 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 being more hostile and angry during the toddler years, bringing out the worst in one another.

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