Study: Children’s Bad Behavior Due to Troubled Parenting

What exactly causes kids to have problems with their behavior? Many factors, of course, play a role in shaping a child’s personality and temperament. Environmental factors, as well as biological factors play a part.

While it may seem overly simplistic to merely attribute children’s bad behavior to bad parenting, though, a study, published in the journal Child Development, which was conducted by the University of Minnesota, claims that it’s actually Mom to blame when kids become aggressive. The general idea is that when problems arise at home, a child is bound to develop behavioral problems as he grows up.

Said Michael Lorber, lead author of the study and a research scientist at the Family Translational Research Group at New York University, Before the study, we thought it was likely the combination of difficult infant temperament and negative parenting that put parent-child pairs most at risk for conflict in the toddler period, and then put the children at risk for conduct problems at school age.”

Lorber shares that in the U.S., more than 70 percent of moms and dads actually use corporal punishment or spanking on their children. 

Lorber and his colleagues performed a neurological exam on 7 to 10-day-old-babies, placing cold items on their skin as well as pinpricks. How the infants reacted to the exam indicated their level of “neonatal difficulty.”