What Children Remember When Parents Try to Be Fair

How Do We Remember Our Parents?

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin examined differences in parenting sons and daughters. In theory, every parent wants to raise their children in the same way. Reality suggests something more complicated.

In a study on parental investment, researchers analyzed responses from 105 adults who evaluated the behavior of their biological mothers and fathers during childhood. The questions covered memories of emotional support, discipline, protection, education, sport, relationships, dating, and levels of freedom.

Daughters More Often Heard About Relationships

The study found that, in the families remembered by participants, mothers were more clearly involved in raising children than fathers. This may not surprise anyone familiar with long-standing gendered divisions of childcare and domestic labor. Yet the differences between the treatment of daughters and sons did not appear in every area. They emerged in specific situations and in the kinds of support each child received.

Parenting Differences Meant Different Challenges

Daughters more often received parental advice about relationships and dating, along with emotional support and greater protection. Boys had more freedom in their relationships with peers. Parents also invested more often in their athletic activity and physical training, and encouraged them more strongly to compete with their peers.

The researchers interpret these patterns as a form of mostly unconscious adjustment of parenting to the child’s sex. In this reading, parents intuitively prepared each child for different challenges that women and men may encounter. That is why, as the scientists suggest in an article published in Human Nature, we can assume that in many homes a son and a daughter may remember their childhoods somewhat differently.

There were also areas in which the researchers did not find significant differences in how daughters and sons were raised.

Education and Emotions Showed Fewer Differences

Parents placed similar importance on education and career support when raising sons and daughters. This means that support and investment in the future of children of both sexes looked broadly comparable.

Research on parenting sons and daughters does not tell us how to raise children. It does, however, offer an interesting contribution to the psychology of family life. It shows that even when a son and a daughter are not treated identically, the difference does not automatically mean neglect or injustice. In some cases, it may reflect an attempt to respond to different needs and to the conditions in which each child grows up.

Read this article in Polish: Córkom rady o miłości, synom o sporcie? Co nam zostaje z dzieciństwa