14 DAY TRIAL // Difficult children can still negatively affect their parents even after they have left the house, a new study carried out by Karen Fingerman, a psychology professor at Purdue University, says.
This new research concluded that parents that have at least one unsuccessful child, have poorer mental health, even though the other children have made it.
This phenomenon is rather problematic, because it basically means that one child's success will never overcome the other's failure and the more problem-ridden children parents have, the worse their mental well-being is.
On the other hand when several children experience success is their education, careers and love life, their parents tend to have a better state of mind and implicitly a better mental health.
For this research scientists worked with 633 parents with 1,251 children from Philadelphia, and asked them to fill in several questionnaires regarding the success of their own children in terms of education, career and relationships.
They were also asked to mention any specific lifestyle or behavioral problems, like drinking, drug problems, trouble with the law, divorce or other relationship problems their offspring might have had, and answer honestly to questions concerning their relationship with their grown children before rating their own personal well-being.
68 percent of the parents had at least one child with lifestyle, emotional, behavioral or physical problems within the previous two years and almost half of the parents said that at least one of their children was very successful.
While 17% had children with no problems and 15 percent had children under average success, the majority of the families – 60%, included both successful and unsuccessful children, LiveScience reports.
Researchers say that having one successful child does not compensate for having other troubled children, as parents feel a greater impact from children's failure than from their success.
Study author Karen Fingerman, says that “having two children suffering problems may be more demanding than having only one child who suffers problems [and] by the same token, having a successful child did not buffer the effects of problem-ridden children.”
These conclusions are the result of the strong connection between parents and children, and the reason for which children's lives affect their genitors is because, in most cases, these last see them as an extension of themselves.
This study was presented at the 118th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.