A 10-year study reveals how harsh parenting may shape the way children respond to fear long into adolescence.
People brought up by harsh parents can become fearful adults, new research shows.
Harsh parents are more likely to spank, shake or frequently become angry with their children.
Researchers found important differences in the brain’s fear-processing circuits among adolescents who had experienced harsh parenting.
People who are naturally anxious may become especially sensitive to threats later in life if they experience harsh parenting.
Early spanking has been linked to greater negative emotions, such as irritability, other research has already shown.
Spanking children is also associated with:
- Poorer mental development.
- Weaker emotional ties between parents and children.
- Increased risk that the child will hit other children.
- Increased risk that the child will later hit their partner.
Dr Valérie La Buissonnière-Ariza, the study’s first author, said:
“It’s already well-known that adversity in childhood can have lot of negative consequences psychologically and socially.
We wanted to look at the more ‘benign’ incidences of adversity: parents who yell at their children, slap them on the hand or bottom, take them by the arms and give them a shake to discipline them.
What we were surprised to find is that not only did these kinds of ‘harsh parenting’ affect children’s behaviour into their teens, they were also related to changes in the functioning of their brain, especially in terms of processing fear and anxiety.”
Real differences in the brain
For the study, 84 adolescents were given a ‘fear conditioning task’, involving looking at faces and hearing a piercing scream.
The researchers followed them for 10 years and grouped them according to the level of harsh parenting they experienced.
Brain scans revealed that young people exposed to harsh parenting processed fear differently.
Dr La Buissonnière-Ariza said:
“I know it’s easy to lose patience and want to lash out, but I’m totally against slapping a child.
My goal isn’t to guilt-trip anyone…But I do want parents to think about what they do and realize that some kinds of disciplining aren’t as harmless as they might seem.
They could actually affect a child’s brain, how it processes fear, especially when it’s done over a long period of time.
And no one should take that lightly.”
Related
The study was published in the journal Biological Psychology (La Buissonnière-Ariza et al., 2019).
