The often-quoted generalization about families is that all the happy ones are the same, but the unhappy ones are all different. Can this apply to parents, too? Are all the good mothers and fathers the same? Is there just one way of being a good parent?
These questions have repeatedly been answered in the negative. Parents with certain characteristics may do better with some children than with others, and some children seem to thrive with specific kinds of adults. Some authors have suggested the idea of "goodness of fit", the happy matching of child characteristics with parent characteristics, making family life smoother and easier than it is for most of us. This idea seems to apply particularly to matches of temperament, the biological or constitutional aspects of personality which do not change easily.
Is there any practical use for these ideas, other than helping us understand that not every family problem is "our fault"? Most of the time, we have little choice about our children's characteristics, and although we may try to change our own, it's difficult. But some researchers, like Grazyna Kochanska, have spent years trying to see how children with certain personalities respond to different kinds of parental behavior-- behavior that in some cases is open to change. For instance, Kochanska has shown that strict, punitive parenting has a negative effect on children with difficult temperaments who are oversensitive and hard to calm.
Recently, Kochanska and her co-workers published an article describing the results of research into the connections between early attachment organization and children's later antisocial behavior (Kochanska, G., Barry, R.A., Stellern, S.A., & O'Bleness, J.J. [2009]. Early attachment organization moderates the parent-child mutually coercive pathway to children's antisocial conduct. Child Development, Vol. 80 (4), pp. 1288-1300).
There are several points that need to be understood before this study and its conclusion will necessarily make sense. The first is the issue of attachment organization. Many readers will be aware that young children are said to have formed an attachment to their caregivers when they seek to be near the adults, especially when frightened or uncomfortable, and avoid strangers who approach them. Not all children have the same attachment organization, though. Many toddlers are said to be securely attached because they are easily comforted by familiar adults after a separation, and because they can explore unfamiliar situations if a familiar person is present to make them feel more at ease. Others are said to be insecure because it is difficult for them to calm down after a scary separation or to relax in an unfamiliar place even though a familiar adult is present (this is a simplified way of describing insecure attachment organization).
A second point is that many researchers have expressed concern about what Kochanska calls harsh, power-assertive parenting. When parents are coercive and insist upon instant obedience to many rules, the outcome for many children is, first, resentful opposition and later, antisocial behavior. Kochanska described the latter as including disruptive and destructive behavior, aggressiveness, remorselessness, and lack of empathy, possibly with a frequency and intensity that could be diagnosed as forms of mental illness.
Kochanska and her colleagues looked at the connections between a child's attachment quality (organization) in toddlerhood and later events in development. They reported that children who were securely attached were less likely to become resentful and oppositional even when their mothers were harsh or coercive later. These authors speculated that secure children may perceive their parents' assertion of power as well-intentioned, whereas insecure children may feel threatened by parental power and respond with anger. If this were the case, the secure children would probably be more likely to understand and accept the messages about behavior that the parents were trying to send, but the insecure children would be more likely to reject the parents' messages and behave in increasingly antisocial ways.
Kochanska and her co-workers emphasized that these two factors (attachment and parenting behavior) could not be the only ones that caused antisocial behavior to develop. They noted that secure children can also become antisocial, but suggested that when this happens, the developmental change does not work in the same way that it does for insecure children. For all the children, both secure and insecure, genetic factors can play a role in development of antisocial tendencies.
Take-home messages? One is that there is probably no single ideal way of parenting. What works well for one child may actually be harmful for another-- difficult though this is to deal with for parents with several children. Another is that developmental outcomes, good or bad, come out of complex combinations of factors; this is why researchers need to study large groups of children rather than the small number to be found even in highly prolific families.
