My latest on BBC Future is all about a phenomenon known as “Bidirectional Parenting” and how we don't shape our children nearly as much as we might think – understanding this could make parenting less stressful, it certainly has for me.
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I never thought that at four years old, our daughter would still interrupt our sleep, which feels especially unfair now that her younger brother sleeps well.
I once tried to plead with her not to wake us up, explaining that it would make us tired the next day. She thought about this for a moment and then replied: "But that's OK if you are tired because you can drink coffee tomorrow."
It was another stark reminder of how much she has changed my daily schedule and habits, including my increasing coffee consumption. But as a growing body of scientific research shows, she may in fact be influencing me on a much deeper level, far beyond my sleep patterns. Meanwhile, my own efforts at influencing her may not be nearly as impactful as I'd like to believe.
Understanding just how much our children shape us – and how much (or little) we shape them – can burst the illusion that as parents, we are in full control. But it could also dispel the stressful feeling that every decision we make as parents will affect them in some irreversible way, and might even open the door to a different kind of family life.
Children begin influencing us even before they are born: we plan for their arrival and adjust our lives to welcome them. As babies, they direct our sleep and, as a side effect, our moods. We know for instance that parents of irritable babies are more stressed, sleep less and may even think they are parenting badly. In a vicious cycle, stress and lack of sleep can then contribute to an increased risk of parental depression and anxiety.
But there's more. Many studies show that a child's innate personality shapes how we parent them.
"Of course, parenting a child is a really different story depending on who the child is," says child psychologist Anne Shaffer at the University of Georgia. "I know clinically we see that parents will come to us because they're having challenges with a child and they'll say, but this worked for my older kid, and we're like: 'This child is a whole different person and so they have a whole different set of needs.'"
Focusing too much on how we parent therefore puts a "tremendous amount of pressure on parents, and it also creates this illusion that if only we do all the right things, we will be able to mould our children into these happy, healthy, successful adults that we all want them to eventually be," says Danielle Dick, author of The Child Code and a geneticist at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The reality may be more complex. For a start, there is mounting evidence that children influence their parents, as well as the other way around – a phenomenon called "bidirectional parenting".
One large study looking at bidirectional parenting and featuring over 1,000 children and their parents, concluded that the child's behaviour had a much stronger influence on their parents' behaviour than the other way around. Parents and their children were interviewed at age eight and again over the subsequent five years. Parental control, the study found, did not change a child's behaviour, but a child's behavioural problems led to less parental warmth and more control.
Research also shows that when children demonstrate challenging behaviour, parents may withdraw or use a more authoritarian (strict and cold) parenting style.
Similarly, parents of adolescents with behavioural issues act with less warmth and more hostility. The opposite occurs for adolescents who show good behaviour: their parents behave with more warmth over time. This reveals that it's not harsh parenting that predicts behavioural problems, says Shaffer, but rather, "children who act out, who are oppositional, who are defiant, have parents who respond by increasing the harshness of their parenting".
That is, the more a child rebels, the more we might escalate our threats or punishments – even if this makes the problem worse, and leads to yet more conflict and defiance.
For more on this - check out the full article on BBC Future.
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