Poster #130 - Beliefs about Heritability Relate to Authoritarian Parenting Beliefs, Parental Control, and Child Depression

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Instilling virtue while avoiding delinquency is a goal for many parents, yet factors impacting early virtue development (or delinquency) are not entirely clear. This lack of clarity is likely related to the complexity of the behaviors. Both are influenced by environmental and genetic factors. Moreover, even without full understanding of the processes at play, lay reasoning about genetics and heritability likely shapes parental beliefs and behaviors related to child outcomes.
Indeed, genetic attributions for traits elicits a view of traits as fixed (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011) and leads to greater internal attributions for others’ behaviors (Cheung & Heine, 2015). In the context of parenting, fixed beliefs about child characteristics promote greater parental control and negativity during tough tasks (Moorman & Pomerantz, 2010), while greater internal attributions relate to dysfunctional parenting responses to child misbehavior (Slep & O’Leary, 1998). Given these findings, we hypothesized that viewing children’s behaviors as genetically determined would predict more authoritarian (i.e., high control, low responsivity, low warmth) approaches to parenting. In addition, because authoritarian parenting is associated with children’s internalizing symptoms (Pinquart, 2017), we expected that parent heritability beliefs would predict child depressive symptoms.
Four studies were conducted to test these possibilities. First, we conducted two “on-line,” correlational studies surveying adult samples from Amazon MTurk to test the relationship between heritability beliefs about virtue and endorsement of authoritarian parenting behaviors. Adult participants were diverse in age, with approximately half identifying as parents. We found that greater beliefs that characteristics are heritable and/or genetically-caused predicted greater endorsement of authoritarian approaches to parenting. A third “on-line” study included a similar sample from MTurk and utilized experimental methods to test a causal process by which exposure to genetic accounts of virtue would increase beliefs about heritability, which in turn would increase the endorsement of authoritarian responses to a hypothetical child’s misbehavior. Evidence for this causal process was obtained. Finally, we used survey data from a longitudinal study of parents, children, and adolescents (ages 9-18; see Reiss, Neiderhiser, Hetherington, & Plomin, 2000 for sample details) to examine how maternal beliefs about the heritability of delinquency might interact with other relevant factors to predict maternal control and child depressive symptoms. We found that, for older children, mothers reported greater efforts to control their children and children reported greater depressive symptoms when mothers perceived that children were more antisocial and that delinquent behaviors were more heritable. This effect was only visible at low levels of family SES.
These results inform the ways that heritability beliefs might impact parent beliefs, parent behaviors, and child outcomes. They indicate that stronger heritability beliefs about virtue relate to greater endorsement of authoritarian parenting practices, which are – perhaps ironically - potentially harmful for virtue development (Pinquart, 2017). Additionally, beliefs about the heritability of delinquency interact with perceptions of antisocial behavior to predict greater parental control and greater child depression, particularly for those low in SES. These studies offer a foundation for further consideration of the role that heritability beliefs play for both parents and children during development.

Authors

• Grace Noelle Rivera, Texas A&M University
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Brooker, Texas A&M
  Non-Presenting Author

• Matthew Vess, Texas A&M University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Matthew Stichter, Washington State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jenae Neiderhiser, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author