As a parent, you may find that you act differently with different children, but when this involves being more positive with one child and more negative with another, a new study has found that not only does it affect the emotional wellbeing of the child who receives more negative feedback, but the wellness of all the children in the family can suffer.
According to Jennifer M. Jenkins, Atkinson Chair of Early Child Development and Education at the University of Toronto, who led the team, ‘Past studies have looked at the effects of differential parenting on the children who get more negative feedback, but our study focused on this as a dynamic operating at two levels of the family system: one that affects all children in the family as well as being specific to the child at the receiving end of the negativity.’
For the study, the team of researchers examined nearly 400 Canadian families with children whose average age ranged from 2 to 5. Whereas previous studies have mostly evaluated differential parenting in only sibling pairs, this study included up to four children per family and used special statistical techniques to differentiate between dynamics operating across the whole family and those specific to individual children. The researchers collected their data from mothers’ reports and observation in the home, and also looked at the number of stressful circumstances in the mother’s current or past life, such as single parenting, low income, past abuse, and safety in the home.
The results showed that the more risks you experience, the more likely you are to treat your children differentially. Those mothers whose lives were more stressful were found to be more differential than their less stressed counterparts, showing a wider range in the amount of warmth and affection they showed with different children in the family.
The results, which were published in the journal Child Development, have huge implications for family wellness. Not only did differential parenting affect negatively-treated children and the family as a whole, but the researchers found that it had a stronger effect at the family level than in the way it affected individual children. Further, the cumulative risk that developed in this style of parenting has been shown to affect child mental wellness, including problems with aggression, attention, and emotion.
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