Citation

Ručević S. Pers. Individ. Dif. 2022; 189: e111512.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.paid.2022.111512

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The current study investigated parental psychopathic personality and its interaction with children's psychopathy features as predictors of parenting practices five years later. Data were used from the prospective longitudinal ECLAT study including 175 children (MFirst assessment = 5.28 years; 80 males and 95 females). At Time 1 parents rated their psychopathy traits, whereas kindergarten teachers rated the child's psychopathy features. Five years later, the parents rated their parenting practices. Overall, the parents' own personality was a stronger predictor of different negative parenting behaviors than the child's personality, with parental callous affect having the strongest associations with parenting behaviors among parental psychopathy dimensions. Similarly, child callous-unemotional traits were the strongest predictor of future parenting. However, out of the 36 possible interactions tested between parental and child psychopathy features predicting future parenting behaviors, only three were significant. Specifically, child Impulsive/need for stimulation appeared to be the most important psychopathy dimension and interestingly, with all parental psychopathy traits interacting with this feature. Overall, these results tend to indicate that, in the presence of parental psychopathy traits, child psychopathy features may have a limited effect on parenting practices, with children high on impulsivity/need for stimulation experiencing the greatest risk for negative and abusive parenting.

Language: en

Keywords

Longitudinal; Parent-child interaction; Parental and child psychopathy; Parenting