December 4, 2000

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Contact: Mary Jane Dunlap, University Relations, (785) 864-8853.

Study of parental attitudes offers hope to reduce abuse

LAWRENCE -- When a toddler refuses to eat certain things on her plate or balks at picking up his toys, how should a parent react?

A positive reaction would be to interpret the child's stage of development, accept that the behavior may be temporary and not get too agitated, says Marion O'Brien, University of Kansas researcher of early childhood development.

A negative reaction would be to interpret the child's behavior as willfully directed at the parent and to set up a power struggle, likely to result in conflict.

O'Brien and other KU researchers recently published a study in the Journal of Family Psychology indicating that parents interpret their children's behavior based on their own childhood experiences. The study found that parents who view their children's behavior positively create a better environment for children.

"If parents think that their parents were harsh with them and punished them a lot, they also tend to be somewhat more harsh with their children and have more negative attitudes about their children's behavior," O'Brien says.

The study offers hope for new parents at risk of abusing or neglecting their children, according to the KU researchers. O'Brien says the study suggests that

  • community support for parenting, including programs to help new parents feel connected to their communities, could be improved for new parents in general.

  • mental health services could be strengthened for new parents whose past or current life experiences seem overwhelmingly negative to them.

  • intervention programs could be developed that would help new parents understand their child-rearing attitudes.

    Parenting programs typically teach parents certain skills -- how to discipline a child, for example -- but these programs are not directed at assessing parents' attitudes about child-rearing or at changing negative attitudes, O'Brien says.

    "We'd like to be able to help some families not look at their children as misbehaving intentionally. But to see them as children who don't have the skills or knowledge to do everything right and to be a little more accepting of some of the things that they do wrong," O'Brien says.

    Julie Daggett, working with O'Brien and others, conducted the study for her doctoral dissertation, interviewing 80 mothers of children ages 1 to 5 about their perceptions of parenting. The KU study is unusual in that the parent participants were selected at large and were not receiving services for child behavior problems.

    The study was funded in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. O'Brien's current research projects include additional studies regarding the passing of attitudes regarding people's behavior from parent to child.

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