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February 12, 2013

Differential parenting found to affect whole family

Parents act differently with different children—for example, being more positive with one child and more negative with another.

A new longitudinal study has found that this behavior negatively affects not only the child who receives more negative feedback, but all the children in the family.

The study also found that the more risks experienced by parents, the more likely they will treat their children differentially.

"Past studies have looked at the effects of differential parenting on the children who get more negative feedback, but our study focused on this as a dynamic operating at two levels of the family system: one that affects all children in the family as well as being specific to the child at the receiving end of the negativity"...

Differential parenting had a stronger effect at the family level than in the way it affected individual children, the study found.

When siblings in families were parented very differently, all children in those families showed more mental health problems. "

In all likelihood, this occurred because differential parenting sets up a dynamic that is very divisive," Jenkins notes.

Kirtland Peterson

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