Nurtured child likely to be good mum

Girls raised in a positive, nurturing environment during their preschool, childhood and adolescent years are much more likely to raise their own children that way, a New Zealand study shows.

The study of more than 200 families also shows such parenting during the early years enhances speech, emotional well-being, thinking skills and academic achievement, an international consortium of researchers report in the journal Child Development.

The researchers said that women - but not men - raised in a low-authoritarian household during the preschool years, with a cohesive, positive family environment and little conflict during the middle childhood years, who established a trusting, openly communicative and close relationship with their parents during their teenage years, were more likely have a warm, sensitive, stimulating parenting style themselves.

Lead researcher Jay Belsky, director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues at London University's Birkbeck College, said there had been little other work on whether positive parenting was transmitted across generations, especially work that followed individuals in adulthood who were studied during childhood.

In comments about the study on the website of the Society for Research in Child Development, Dr Belsky said there had been many studies showing that negative parenting behaviour, such as harsh discipline or even child abuse, was often transmitted across generations.

Dr Belsky and researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and the University of Otago and Canterbury University, used the Dunedin longitudinal sample of more than 1000 New Zealanders born in the early 1970s. The New Zealand researchers were Judith Sligo and Phil Silva of Otago University, and Lianne Woodward of Canterbury University.

Their work focused on the 228 participants who had become parents.

Information on how the parents were themselves reared between 3 years and 15 had been obtained from repeated interviews with their mothers while they were growing up.

Researchers obtained information about how these now-grown children parented their own children by visiting their homes and videotaping them interacting with their child in a variety of situations, including play and teaching, when the child was 3 to 5 years old.

The team's findings, said Dr Belsky, showed "it is not just problematic parenting, known to undermine a child's well-being, that can be handed down across generations, but also the kind of parenting known to foster healthy child development".

One of the remaining mysteries, he said, was why child-rearing history only predicted how mothers parented, not fathers. This could be because the information collected from the initial children in the study included little information on fathering.

- NZPA