Relationships - Page 27 of 30

This Early Parental Behaviour Predicts A Child’s Academic and Social Skills 3 Decades Later

This parental behaviour in the first three years is vital to a child’s future success.

This parental behaviour in the first three years is vital to a child’s future success.

Sensitive caregiving in the first three years of life can predict academic achievement and social competence all the way into adulthood, a new study finds.

Parents who are sensitive caregivers tend to respond to their child’s signals promptly and appropriately.

Sensitive parents are also positively involved in interactions with the child and provide a secure base for them to explore the world.

Dr. Lee Raby, who led the study, said:

“The study indicates that the quality of children’s early caregiving experiences has an enduring and ongoing role in promoting successful social and academic development into the years of maturity.”

The conclusions, published in the journal Child Development, come from a study of 243 people born into poverty from a range of backgrounds (Raby et al., 2014).

Their progress was followed from birth to age 32 as part of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation.

Parents were observed interacting with their children during the first three years of the infants’ lives.

Later on, children completed standardised tests and their social adaptation was reported on by their teachers.

The researchers continued to follow the children, even into their twenties and thirties, asking them about their adult relationships and academic attainment.

The results showed that even into their thirties, those early caregiving experiences continued to be linked to their eventual academic attainment.

Social functioning was less strongly linked to early caregiving experiences with the effect tailing off into participants’ thirties.

Dr Raby said:

“Altogether, the study suggests that children’s experiences with parents during the first few years of life have a unique role in promoting social and academic functioning–not merely during the first two decades of life, but also during adulthood.
This suggests that investments in early parent-child relationships may result in long-term returns that accumulate across individuals’ lives.
Because individuals’ success in relationships and academics represents the foundation for a healthy society, programs and initiatives that equip parents to interact with their children in a sensitive manner during the first few years of their children’s life can have long-term benefits for individuals, families, and society at large.”

Image credit: Stephan Hochhaus

Same-Sex Parenting Does Not Harm Children, Research Review Finds

Are two mothers better than one?

Children who are raised by same-sex parents do just as well in social development, education and emotionally as those raised by heterosexual couples, an Australian review of the research finds.

In Australia 11% of gay men and 33% of lesbians have children–figures which will likely increase as barriers are reduced.

The review of the research was conduced by Deb Dempsey and commissioned by the Australian Institute of Family Studies (Dempsey, 2014).

The research certainly does not support the view that children brought up by same-sex parents are harmed as a result.

Two mothers

Quite the contrary, children brought up by lesbians may benefit from having two mothers–often reporting better relationships with their children and displaying higher levels of involvement.

The reason for this could be…

“…due to the “double dose” of “feminine” parenting. Just as heterosexual mothers usually have greater care-giving responsibilities and display greater parenting skill than heterosexual fathers, lesbian mothers appear to bring this gendered tendency to their parenting relationships.” (Dempsey, 2014).

While the review was broadly positive, some worries were expressed: children of same-sex parents are more likely to report concerns about bullying or other abuse based on the sexuality of their parents.

Set against this, the review finds that while there is fear of this type of bullying or abuse, it is not often actually experienced.

Equitable but not identical

Same-sex couples are also more likely to set an equitable example for their children. They are more likely to share the housework and to avoid privileging work over home-life.

While some studies have found negative effects on children of having same-sex parents (e.g. Regnerus, 2012), these have not taken into account the higher rates of separation amongst same-sex couples.

Experts no longer try to claim that outcomes of same-sex parenting are identical to heterosexual couples– along with some potential advantages comes the social stigma and higher rates of separation.

Nevertheless, a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics points out:

“Over the past decade, 11 countries have recognized marriage equality and, thus, allow marriage between 2 partners of the same gender: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden. There has been no evidence that children in these countries have experienced difficulties as a result of these social changes.” (Perrin et al., 2013)

Image credit: Caitlin Childs

Childhood Poverty and Stress Harms Adult Brain Function

Childhood stress and poverty linked to problems regulating the emotions in adulthood, according to a new study.

There’s no sugar-coating it: growing up relatively poor is bad for you.

Children from less affluent families are, on average, more likely to suffer both physical and psychological illnesses later in life.

This is hardly a surprise, but it’s a puzzle exactly how poverty influences psychological problems.

One idea is that exposure to stress at a young age–while the brain is still developing–causes permanent damage to the ability to deal with stress.

This theory has been lent support by a new study in which researchers tested the brain function of participants at 24-years-old, 15 years after their childhood situations had first been assessed (Kim et al., 2013).

The test itself involved controlling the emotions: participants were asked to look at pictures while trying to suppress negative emotions.

Being able to control your emotions is a key factor in coping with all the stresses and strains that life throws at people.

The results showed that those whose families were the poorest when they were 9-years-old performed the worst on the tests as 24-year-olds.

And, it didn’t matter if they had subsequently climbed out of poverty; it was coming from a poor background that was the overriding factor in how their brains functioned on this test.

One of the study’s authors, Professor K. Luan Phan, explained:

“Our findings suggest that the stress-burden of growing up poor may be an underlying mechanism that accounts for the relationship between poverty as a child and how well your brain works as an adult.”

Poor but well-balanced?

It wasn’t only childhood poverty that was connected to lower control over the emotions, childhood stress was important too.

Some participants had been relatively poor as children but had been protected from childhood stress–they performed better on the emotional suppression task.

Those who had been exposed to both childhood poverty and many stressors–like noise, poor housing, violence and family turmoil–did the worst on the test.

As if we needed any more encouragement to tackle inequality in society, especially among children.

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Kissing: Its Vital Role in Choosing and Keeping Partners

Two new studies of kissing have found that apart from being sexy, kissing also helps people choose partners–and keep them

Two new studies of kissing have found that apart from being sexy, kissing also helps people choose partners–and keep them.

In a survey, women in particular rated kissing as important, but more promiscuous members of both sexes rated kissing has a very important way of testing out a new mate (Wlodarski & Dunbar, 2013).

One of the study’s authors Professor Robin Dunbar explained that kissing may help solve the ‘Jane Austen’ problem:

“In choosing partners, we have to deal with the ‘Jane Austen problem’: How long do you wait for Mr Darcy to come along when you can’t wait forever and there may be lots of women waiting just for him? At what point do you have to compromise for the curate? …[and] kissing plays a role in assessing a potential partner.”

But kissing isn’t just important at the start of a relationship; it also has a role in maintaining a relationship.

The researchers found a correlation between the amount of kissing that long-term partners did and the quality of their relationship. This link wasn’t seen between more sex and improved relationship satisfaction.

In a second study, the researchers looked at the link between women’s menstrual cycle and the importance of kissing (Wlodarski & Dunbar, 2013).

What they found was that when relationships were young, kissing was most important at the most fertile stage of women’s cycles. This suggests kissing could be a way of assessing a potential partner’s genes.

Image credit: Daniel Stark

Men Want Women to Split Dating Costs But Are Scared to Ask

Paying for dates: survey of 17,000+ people finds men’s sense of chivalry erodes fast.

The survey of unmarried, heterosexual men and women found that men were willing to absorb the cost of early dates, but this quickly changes with time.

In fact:

44% of men said they would stop dating a woman who never pays.
64% of men believed women should contribute to dating expenses.
57% of women said they offer to pay but 39% admitted they hoped the man wouldn’t accept.
In any case, 76% of men said they felt guilty about accepting women’s money.

There was a slight discrepancy in how much each gender thought they contributed. Most men and women agreed it was men who mainly picked up the tab; but the proportions didn’t match. 84% of men thought they paid for most dating expenses, while just 58% of women agreed.

One of the study’s authors, David Frederick, explained that the motivation for the research was…

“…to understand why some gendered practices are more resistant to change than others; for example, the acceptance of women in the workplace versus holding onto traditional notions of chivalry.”

For example, we know that in eight out of ten marriages, both partners contribute towards the household living expenses. But how soon do these ideas of financial equality enter a fledgling relationship?

Who pays for dates is one of those unwritten social rules that is still in flux.

The reason men feel guilty about letting women chip in for the date is because they’ve been taught they should pay. However men have also been taught that men and women should have egalitarian partnerships, so costs should be shared.

It seems that for younger men at least, the current compromise is for them to pay for dates at the start. This makes them feel manly (and demonstrates they’re not tight). But, later on, women are expected to chip in to help reach the egalitarian ideal. David Frederick calls this ‘tapered chivalry’.

The research suggested 25% of couples were splitting dating costs within the first month or their relationship, 25% did so in months 1-3, another 25% in months 4-6, and the remaining quarter of men were still paying all the dating expenses after 6 months.

→ The paper, which was presented at the American Sociological Association’s 108th Annual Meeting, is called “Who Pays for Dates? Following versus Challenging Conventional Gender Norms,” by David Frederick and Janet Lever.

Image credit: Charles Thompson

How Just One Night’s Poor Sleep Can Hurt a Relationship

Study tracked couple’s sleep and their arguments to reveal how the damage was done.

“Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.” —George Bernard Shaw

People are usually at their worst after a bad night’s sleep, but what does that do to their intimate relationships?

A new study finds that even one bad night’s sleep can be surprisingly damaging to a relationship (Gordon & Chen, 2013).

In the research, 78 couples were tracked over a two-week period. Each day the couples made notes about their sleep quality and any arguments they’d had with their partners.

The results showed that even for those who were good sleepers, just a single night’s poor sleep was associated with increased relationship conflict the next day.

These findings were not affected by one partner being the source of the poor sleep, or overall relationship satisfaction, depression, stress or anxiety.

Only one partner in the couple had to have a bad night’s sleep and their relationship suffered the next day. Four processes caused by the poor sleep are to blame:

Less empathy. The worse couples slept, the less empathy they showed towards their partners. And it worked both ways: after a bad night’s sleep, not only did they find it difficult to judge their partner’s emotions, it was difficult for their partner to read them in turn.
More negativity. There will always be bad feelings at some stage in a relationship; but to be a good relationship overall, these should be massively outweighed by the good feelings. When partners slept poorly, this ratio went in the wrong direction towards more negative feelings.
Conflict resolution problems. When tired, couples found it harder to resolve their differences.
Selfishness. Poor sleep can induce more selfish feelings in partners and they feel less able to appreciate and feel gratitude towards the other.

Since poor sleep can also damage your health, as well as your relationship, it’s vital to address these issues as soon as possible.

The good news is that improving sleep can improve the relationship. In fact, it works both ways. One study has found that better sleep encourages better relationships and that the improved relationship status feeds back into improved sleep (Hasler et al., 2010).

So, starting to sleep better can put your relationship into a virtuous circle that continues to reap the benefits.

Image credit: Sheldon Wood

The Four Things That Kill a Relationship Stone Dead

A recipe for divorce: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling.

For over 40 years the psychologist Professor John Gottman has been analysing relationships, both good and bad.

He’s followed couples across decades in many psychological studies to see what kinds of behaviours predict whether they would stay together in the long-term or were soon destined for the divorce courts.

Amongst the factors he identified, four have stood out, time and time again. When Gottman sees a couple’s communication overrun with these, the chances are they will divorce in an average of around six years from their marriage.

1. Criticism

Of course we all complain to each other—married couples more than most—but it’s a particular type of corrosive criticism that Gottman identified as being so destructive.

This is when one criticises the other’s core being, their personality. For example: “You’re late because you don’t care about me“.

We all make mistakes, but notice that here it’s all about how those mistakes are interpreted. At their worst, criticisms have the implication that the other person is bad or wrong at some deeper level.

Repeated criticisms that strike at the heart of the other person’s being signal the end of the relationship will be sooner rather than later.

Alternatively: voice the concern and make a request, e.g. “I’m bored, let’s have a game of cards.” (NOT: “You’re ignoring me you selfish @#$%!”)

2. Contempt

When someone has contempt for their partner, Gottman found that this was the single greatest predictor of divorce.

Contempt can involve sarcasm, name-calling, mimicking and eye-rolling. Whatever form it takes, contempt makes the other person feel worthless.

(Contempt is also bad for your health, as Gottman found that couples who were contemptuous of each other suffered from more infectious diseases like colds and flu.)

Alternatively: build respect by appreciating the positive, e.g. “Love your taste in music!” (NOT “The sound of your laughter makes me want to vomit.”)

3. Defensiveness

A person is too defensive when they are always trying to make excuses for their failures or slip-ups. People do this automatically from time-to-time, but when it becomes a persistent theme in a relationship, this can signal the end.

It’s an even worse signal when partners are also trying to score points off the other on top of being defensive. After all, people who live together are supposed to be in partnership, supporting each other. Life is difficult enough without being attacked from within as well as from without.

Alternatively: take your share of the blame and suggest a solution, e.g. “I guess I should have put it on my list, OK let’s do it now.” (NOT: No, I didn’t pay the gas bill because you forgot to remind me.”)

4. Stonewalling

Stonewalling is when a person metaphorically raises the drawbridge and cuts off communication. There are no nods of encouragement to their partner when they speak, no attempt to empathise and no effort to respond or connect. It’s like talking to a brick wall.

Stonewalling can often be a result of a prolonged period of criticism, contempt and defensiveness. It may feel like the only response to a worsening situation, but lack of communication will not solve the problems at the heart of the relationship.

Alternatively: speak, move, respond, blink, move a muscle, anything! (NOT: here’s my impression of a brick wall.)

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It’s My Way or the Highway: Why People Are Evangelists for Their Own Way of Life

Have you noticed that people who are married want everyone else to be married too…?

…and people who are single think being single is the only way to live for a civilised, modern individual?

People easily become evangelists for their own way of life. Some apparently think that because they have made a particular life choice, everyone else should do the same.

Why is it so difficult to accept that different choices suit different people?

That’s the question that fascinated Laurin et al. (2013), who set about testing an explanation.

They wondered if it was a result of feeling that your own situation is relatively unchangeable. Say you feel that you’ll never meet anyone and you’ll be single forever, or that you’ll be stuck in a marriage forever with no hope of release.

They wondered if the mind battles this apparent inevitability by rationalising and idealising the current situation, whatever it is.

Idealising a situation makes it more likely you’ll see it as best for everyone, rather than the something that happens to be right for your particular circumstances.

Across four studies, the researchers found exactly this pattern. When people thought their relationship status was unchangeable they were more likely to idealise it. They were also more likely to like others whose status was the same as theirs:

“The knowledge that others live their lives differently than oneself can threaten the rationality of one’s own life choices, and the idealization of one’s own status provides a simple rationalization in the face of these ever-present potential threats. This idealization implies that others are worse off because of their different life arrangements and that “the way I am is the way everyone ought to be.”” (Laurin et al., 2013)

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How to Help Other People Change Their Habits

Three pointers on helping someone else change their habits.

Having written a book on how to change your own habits, in interviews I was often asked: how can I change another person’s habits?

Say I want my partner to stop cracking his knuckles or get my daughter to put down her mobile phone at meal times or start someone else exercising: how do I do that?

It’s not something I cover in the book, which focuses mainly on how habits work, how much of our everyday lives they influence and how to change your own personal habits.

Ultimately the same techniques apply; but when you are working on someone else, you’ve got to take a few steps back. Do they want to change? If not, can you persuade them? How will this attempt to change them affect your relationship?

Then, if you manage that, you can move on to using all the same techniques that you might use on yourself.

So here are three preliminary things to think about when trying to change someone else’s habits:

1. Are they open to change?

First up, and most obviously, people have to be open to the possibility of change.

People can be very defensive about their habits. They’ve taken years to develop and have become part of their identity; alternatively they are simply ashamed of them and want to try and justify them.

So, you may want your partner to stop cracking his knuckles or spending all his time on his smartphone, but is he open to the possibility that something might be done?

If not then even broaching the subject may be a waste of time. But let’s say you think they might be open to change, that brings me on to…

2. Being non-judgemental

One thing therapists are taught when dealing with patients is to be non-judgemental. There’s a good reason for that: it’s not just that no one likes to be judged, but that it sets the wrong tone. The wrong tone is: I know best what’s good for you and I’m telling you what to do. Not many people want to be ordered around like a dog.

The right tone has you both on an even footing and is warm and supportive. You’re a helpful friend who is interested in their well-being but is still accepting who they are.

As you can imagine, this can be a difficult balance. But, for most people, just avoiding being judgemental is a really great start. We humans seem to love passing judgement on anything and everything and it’s a difficult habit to give up.

3. Increasing their self-awareness

Along with detecting the seeds of change and being non-judgemental, one of the main things you can help someone else with is their self-awareness.

It’s a central feature of habits is that people perform them unconsciously and repeatedly in the same situations. To name a few good habits: we brush our teeth in the bathroom, look both ways before we cross the road and put our seatbelts on in the car before we pull away.

A vital step in changing a habit, then, is identifying the situation in which it occurs. You can help other people identify the situations by gently pointing out what seems to prompt them to perform the habit. For example, are there particular emotions or physical situations that are associated with the habit?

If so, making the other person aware of these can help them change that habit.

Working together

So getting other people to change is firstly about backing up from the techniques of habit change and seeing if the other person is open to tweaking their behaviour. You can’t make other people change if they don’t want to.

After this you can move on to all the techniques I describe in the book. I’ve listed some of these in my article on how to make New Year’s resolutions. These include things like choosing an alternative behaviour, making specific plans, thinking about things that are likely to trip them up, and so on.

These three pointers are just to get you started and by no means cover all bases. For children things are slightly different, for more seriously ingrained and destructive habits, these are only the beginning. But nevertheless these are a good place to start.

In theory with two people working together to change one person’s habit, you are in a stronger position. It’s not just that you can be their cheerleader; it’s also that you can objectively look at their behaviour and make them aware of connections that might otherwise be mostly or completely unconscious.

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“Is the Internet Good/Bad For You?” and Other Dumb Questions

Are we beginning to ask the right questions about the psychological effects of the Internet?

Over the last few years we’ve been bombarded by articles and books about Facebook, social media and the Internet in general. The slant of these tends to go one of three ways (and for each one ‘Facebook’ is interchangeable with ‘Twitter’, ‘the Internet’ or whatever):

Facebook is great! We’re all connected to each other so it’s easier to get a new job, find old friends, create amazing stuff together and live happily ever after.
Facebook is horrible! It’s filled with stalking; it generates jealously, loneliness and destroys our real relationships with each other.
Facebook’s effects are mixed: some research says it’s good for you, some says it’s bad for you.

Unfortunately all these approaches are based on a bad assumption; even the third one (although it gets closest to the truth). The problem is that they’re all a bit like asking: is life good for you? The question is crass.

The effects of Facebook, the same as for all social media, the Internet in general, and even life itself will depend on exactly what you do with it.

Consider Facebook for a moment. There are all kinds of things you can do: stalk old partners, play games, find fascinating content, keep in touch with old friends or look at random pictures of other people’s drunken nights out (not all of these are recommendations).

People’s creativity in using online services streaks way ahead of our knowledge of what it means and how it affects us. In fact we’re only just starting to see studies that make more fine-grained distinctions about what people are actually doing online and how that may, or may not, be good for them.

A recent example made a telling distinction between active and passive Facebook use (Burke et al., 2010). Passive Facebook use includes scrolling through other people’s photos and reading their updates while active use includes updating your status and writing private messages. Perhaps you’ll be unsurprised to learn that the active kind is the good one for increasing social bonding.

Although this is a relatively crude distinction, at least it’s starting to look at how people are using social media like Facebook, not just how much.

In a similar vein, there’s a new study looking at Facebook use and loneliness. It examines the old question about whether being online makes us lonely which, I’ve discussed along with other bugbears here.

Instead of doing a survey, though, they carried out an experiment (Deters & Mehl, 2012). They wanted to know if Facebook status updating could cause you to feel less lonely. Long story (as it must be nowadays) short; in the group they studied, it did.

When participants made more Facebook updates, they felt less lonely and this was caused by feeling more connected to their friends on a daily basis. Surprisingly it didn’t depend on whether their friends replied or not, or how they replied, just reaching out had the effect of reducing loneliness.

Now this won’t be the end of the argument about whether Facebook or the Internet in general is good for us, but it’s a great start and at least it asks the right questions. It looks experimentally at a specific aspect of Facebook usage, status updating, to look at the effects on loneliness.

If anything, the study reiterates something we know from our everyday, offline lives. If you see a friend in the street it’s better to say hi and ask how they are than passively observe them from a distance. But it’s good to know that this simple intuition is confirmed in an online environment.

More broadly, it’s the type of study that’s looking a bit deeper into what social media and the Internet are doing to us by breaking the question down. It’s an encouraging sign.

We may not yet be able to say that much about what aspects of Internet use are psychologically good or bad for us, but at least we’re starting to ask the right questions.

Image credit: Viktor Hertz