Study: Antisocial behaviors in children linked to parenting

The parents are more likely to be affected by this problem and to be more sensitive to it.

Researchers at the University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University studied 227 peers of identical twins. They analyze differences in the parenting of each of the two types of behavior.

The study finds that the twin has experienced greater aggression and lack of empathy and moral compass.

These characteristics are known as callous-unemotional traits.

"The study convincingly shows that parenting-and not just genes-contributes to the development of risky callous-unemotional traits," said Luke Hyde, U-M's associate professor of psychology. "Because these twins have the same DNA, we can be more sure that the differences in parenting the twins received affects the development of these traits."

Parents of the twins completed a 50-item questionnaire about the home environment, establishing their harshness and warmth levels.

The work, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Adolescent Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, is the latest in a series of studies from Penn's Rebecca Waller, assistant professor of psychology, and colleagues using a variety of aspects of parenting.

"Some of the early work on callous-unemotional traits focused on their biological bases, like genetics and the brain, making the argument that these traits develop in a child's environment, that parenting does not matter," said Waller. , lead author of the current study. "We felt there was something we could change in the environment that might prevent a child from going to the extreme antisocial behavior."

Waller says it helps to prevent a child from developing these traits or to improve troubling behaviors.

"From a real-world standpoint, creating interventions that are practically able to change behaviors in different types of families is complicated," she said. "But these results show that small differences in how do we care?" Our focus is on adapting already-successful parenting programs to include specific interventions.

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