Study suggests parents’ negative disciplinary approach to antisocial kids is “child-driven"

A new study sheds some light on the relationship between childhood problems and parenting styles, and offers insight into the role that genes play in callous, unemotional behavior in children.

Henrik Larsson and colleagues studied 4,430 same-sex twins, slightly more than half of them boys, participating in a long-range study in Britain. (Studies of identical and fraternal twins are helpful because they allow researchers to tease out the effects of genetics and environment.) When the children were 7 years old, Larsson and colleagues asked teachers to rate their levels of antisocial behavior (AB) and callous-unemotional behavior (CU). Childhood antisocial behavior consists of fighting, bullying, and similar behaviors, while callous-unemotional behavior (for instance, a lack of sympathy toward a peer in distress) is a trait strongly associated with adult antisocial or psychopathic behavior.

At three points—when the children were 3, 4, and 7—the researchers assessed the parents’ feelings toward the children and the harshness of the parents’ disciplinary practices. Parents also provided information about children’s conduct problems and hyperactivity at ages 3 and 4.

Larsson and colleagues found that CU traits were highly heritable in the children whether or not they exhibited antisocial behavior. The researchers also found that parents reported experiencing more negative feelings and using more harsh disciplinary practices if their children had AB or combined AB/CU than if the children had neither problem or CU alone. These negative parenting characteristics, further analysis showed, were “child-driven”—that is, they occurred in response to the children’s initial conduct problems and hyperactivity. The researchers note that this does not rule out effects of parenting on children’s behavior, since such effects appear to be bi-directional. However, the findings are contrary to the views of many social scientists who attribute childhood antisocial behavior solely to flawed parenting.