Parenting is often conceptualized in terms of its effects on offspring. However, children may also play an active role in influencing the parenting they receive. Simple correlations between parenting and child outcomes may be due to parent-to-child causation, child-to-parent causation, or some combination of the two. We use a multirater, genetically informative, large sample (n = 1,411 twin sets) to gain traction on this issue as it relates to parental warmth and stress in the context of child Big Five personality. Considerable variance in parental warmth (27%) and stress (45%) was attributable to child genetic influences on parenting. Incorporating child Big Five personality into the model roughly explained half of this variance. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that parents mold their parenting in response to their child’s personality. Residual heritability of parenting is likely due to child characteristics beyond the Big Five.

Anderson, K. E., Lytton, H., Romney, D. M. (1986). Mothers’ interactions with normal and conduct-disordered boys: Who affects whom? Developmental Psychology, 22, 604. Google Scholar, ISI
Avinun, R., Knafo, A. (2014). Parenting as a reaction evoked by children’s genotype: A meta-analysis of children-as-twins studies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 18, 87102. Google Scholar, SAGE Journals, ISI
Bell, R. Q. (1968). A reinterpretation of the direction of effects in studies of socialization. Psychological Review, 75, 8195. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Belsky, J. (1984). The determinants of parenting: A process model. Child Development, 55, 8396. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Berg-Nielsen, T. S., Vikan, A., Dahl, A. A. (2002). Parenting related to child and parental psychopathology: A descriptive review of the literature. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 7, 529552. Google Scholar, SAGE Journals
Boomsma, D. I., Helmer, Q., Nieuwboer, H. A., Hottenga, J. J., de Moor, M. H., van Den Berg, S. M.…Willemsen, G. (2018). An extended twin-pedigree study of neuroticism in the Netherlands Twin Register. Behavior Genetics, 48, 111. Google Scholar, Medline
Briley, D. A., Harden, K. P., Tucker-Drob, E. M. (2014). Child characteristics and parental educational expectations: Evidence for transmission with transaction. Developmental Psychology, 50, 26142632. Google Scholar, Medline
Button, T. M., Lau, J. Y., Maughan, B., Eley, T. C. (2008). Parental punitive discipline, negative life events and gene–environment interplay in the development of externalizing behavior. Psychological Medicine, 38, 2939. Google Scholar, Medline
Conley, D., Rauscher, E., Dawes, C., Magnusson, P. K., Siegal, M. L. (2013). Heritability and the equal environments assumption: Evidence from multiple samples of misclassified twins. Behavior Genetics, 43, 415426 Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Coplan, R. J., Reichel, M., Rowan, K. (2009). Exploring the associations between maternal personality, child temperament, and parenting: A focus on emotions. Personality and Individual Differences, 46, 241246. Google Scholar, ISI
de Haan, A. D., Deković, M., van den Akker, A. L., Stoltz, S. E. M. J., Prinzie, P. (2013). Developmental personality types from childhood to adolescence: Associations with parenting and adjustment. Child Development, 84, 20152030. Google Scholar, Medline
Göllner, R., Roberts, B. W., Damian, R. I., Lüdtke, O., Jonkmann, K., Trautwein, U. (2017). Whose “storm and stress” is it? Parent and child reports of personality development in the transition to early adolescence. Journal of Personality, 85, 376387. Google Scholar, Medline
Harden, K. P., Tucker-Drob, E. M., Tackett, J. L. (2013). The Texas Twin Project. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 16, 385390. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Heath, A. C., Nyholt, D. R., Neuman, R., Madden, P. A., Bucholz, K. K., Todd, R. D.…Martin, N. G. (2003). Zygosity diagnosis in the absence of genotypic data: An approach using latent class analysis. Twin Research, 6, 2226. Google Scholar, Medline
Hu, L. T., Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6, 155. Google Scholar, ISI
Jaffee, S. R., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T. E., Polo-Tomas, M., Price, T. S., Taylor, A. (2004). The limits of child effects: Evidence for genetically mediated child effects on corporal punishment but not on physical maltreatment. Developmental Psychology, 40, 10471058. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
John, O. P., Naumann, L. P., Soto, C. J. (2008). Paradigm shift to the integrative Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and conceptual issues. In John, O. P., Robins, R. W., Pervin, L. A. (Eds.), Handbook of personality (pp.114158). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Google Scholar
Karraker, K. H., Coleman, P. K. (2005). The effects of child characteristics on parenting. In Parenting: An ecological perspective (2nd ed., pp. 147176). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Google Scholar
Keller, M. C., Coventry, W. L., Heath, A. C., Martin, N. G. (2005). Widespread evidence for non-additive genetic variation in Cloninger’s and Eysenck’s personality dimensions using a twin plus sibling design. Behavior Genetics, 35, 707721. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Klahr, A. M., Burt, S. A. (2014). Elucidating the etiology of individual differences in parenting: A meta-analysis of behavioral genetic research. Psychological Bulletin, 140, 544586. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Knafo, A., Plomin, R. (2006). Parental discipline and affection and children’s prosocial behavior: Genetic and environmental links. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 147164. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
McAdams, T. A., Gregory, A. M., Eley, T. C. (2013). Genes of experience: Explaining the heritability of putative environmental variables through their association with behavioural and emotional traits. Behavior Genetics, 43, 314328. Google Scholar, Medline
McBride, B. A., Schoppe, S. J., Rane, T. R. (2002). Child characteristics, parenting stress, and parental involvement: Fathers versus mothers. Journal of Marriage and Family, 64, 9981011. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2002.00998.x Google Scholar, ISI
McGue, M., Bouchard, T. J. (1984). Adjustment of twin data for the effects of age and sex. Behavior Genetics, 14, 325343. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Morris, A. S., Silk, J. S., Steinberg, L., Sessa, F. M., Avenevoli, S., Essex, M. J. (2002). Temperamental vulnerability and negative parenting as interacting predictors of child adjustment. Journal of Marriage and Family, 64, 461471. Google Scholar, ISI
Narusyte, J., Andershed, A. K., Neiderhiser, J. M., Lichtenstein, P. (2007). Aggression as a mediator of genetic contributions to the association between negative parent–child relationships and adolescent antisocial behavior. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 16, 128137. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Patterson, M. W., Cheung, A. K., Mann, F. D., Tucker-Drob, E. M., Harden, K. P. (2017). Multivariate analysis of genetic and environmental influences on parenting in adolescence. Journal of Family Psychology, 31, 532541. Google Scholar, Medline
Pike, A., McGuire, S., Hetherington, E. M., Reiss, D., Plomin, R. (1996). Family environment and adolescent depressive symptoms and antisocial behavior: A multivariate genetic analysis. Developmental Psychology, 32, 590603. Google Scholar
Plomin, R., DeFries, J. C., Loehlin, J. C. (1977). Genotype-environment interaction and correlation in the analysis of human behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 84, 309322. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Polderman, T. J. C., Benyamin, B., de Leeuw, C. A., Sullivan, P. F., van Bochoven, A., Visscher, P. M., Posthuma, D. (2015). Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies. Nature Genetics, 47, 702709. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Rietveld, M. J. H., van Der Valk, J. C., Bongers, I. L., Stroet, T. M., Slagboom, P. E., Boomsma, D. I. (2000). Zygosity diagnosis in young twins by parental report. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 3, 134141. Google Scholar
Rimfeld, K., Kovas, Y., Dale, P. S., Plomin, R. (2016). True grit and genetics: Predicting academic achievement from personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111, 780. Google Scholar, Medline
Sameroff, A. (2009). The transactional model. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Google Scholar
Scarr, S., McCartney, K. (1983). How people make their own environments: A theory of genotype→ Environment effects. Child Development, 54, 424435. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Smith, C. L. (2010). Multiple determinants of parenting: Predicting individual differences in maternal parenting behavior with toddlers. Parenting: Science and Practice, 10, 117. Google Scholar
Soto, C. J., John, O. P. (2009). Ten facet scales for the Big Five Inventory: Convergence with NEO PI-R facets, self-peer agreement, and discriminant validity. Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 8490. Google Scholar, ISI
Stern, M., Hildebrandt, K. A. (1986). Prematurity stereotyping: Effects on mother-infant interaction. Child Development, 57, 308315. Google Scholar, Medline
Turkheimer, E. (2000). Three laws of behavior genetics and what they mean. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 160164. Google Scholar, SAGE Journals, ISI
Turkheimer, E., Harden, K. P. (2014). Behavior genetic research methods. In Reis, H., Judd, C. (eds.), Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology, 2nd ed. (pp. 159187). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
van den Akker, A., Deković, M., Prinzie, P. (2010). Transitioning to adolescence: How changes in child personality and overreactive parenting predict adolescent adjustment problems. Development and Psychopathology, 22, 151163. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
van den Berg, S. M., de Moor, M. H. M., McGue, M., Pettersson, E., Terracciano, A., Verweij, K. J. H.…Boomsma, D. I. (2014). Harmonization of neuroticism and extraversion phenotypes across inventories and cohorts in the genetics of personality consortium: An application of item response theory. Behavior Genetics, 44, 295313. Google Scholar, Medline
Verhoeven, M., Junger, M., Van Aken, C., Deković, M., Van Aken, M. A. (2007). Parenting during toddlerhood: Contributions of parental, contextual, and child characteristics. Journal of Family Issues, 28, 16631691. Google Scholar, SAGE Journals, ISI
Webster-Stratton, C., Reid, M. J., Hammond, M. (2004). Treating children with early-onset conduct problems: Intervention outcomes for parent, child, and teacher training. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 33, 105124. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Wenk, R. E., Houtz, T., Brooks, M., Chiafari, F. A. (1992). How frequent is heteropaternal superfecundation? Acta geneticae medicae et gemellologiae: Twin Research, 41, 4347. Google Scholar
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Parenting is often conceptualized in terms of its effects on offspring. However, children may also play an active role in influencing the parenting they receive. Simple correlations between parenting and child outcomes may be due to parent-to-child causation, child-to-parent causation, or some combination of the two. We use a multirater, genetically informative, large sample (n = 1,411 twin sets) to gain traction on this issue as it relates to parental warmth and stress in the context of child Big Five personality. Considerable variance in parental warmth (27%) and stress (45%) was attributable to child genetic influences on parenting. Incorporating child Big Five personality into the model roughly explained half of this variance. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that parents mold their parenting in response to their child’s personality. Residual heritability of parenting is likely due to child characteristics beyond the Big Five.

Anderson, K. E., Lytton, H., Romney, D. M. (1986). Mothers’ interactions with normal and conduct-disordered boys: Who affects whom? Developmental Psychology, 22, 604. Google Scholar, ISI
Avinun, R., Knafo, A. (2014). Parenting as a reaction evoked by children’s genotype: A meta-analysis of children-as-twins studies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 18, 87102. Google Scholar, SAGE Journals, ISI
Bell, R. Q. (1968). A reinterpretation of the direction of effects in studies of socialization. Psychological Review, 75, 8195. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Belsky, J. (1984). The determinants of parenting: A process model. Child Development, 55, 8396. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Berg-Nielsen, T. S., Vikan, A., Dahl, A. A. (2002). Parenting related to child and parental psychopathology: A descriptive review of the literature. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 7, 529552. Google Scholar, SAGE Journals
Boomsma, D. I., Helmer, Q., Nieuwboer, H. A., Hottenga, J. J., de Moor, M. H., van Den Berg, S. M.…Willemsen, G. (2018). An extended twin-pedigree study of neuroticism in the Netherlands Twin Register. Behavior Genetics, 48, 111. Google Scholar, Medline
Briley, D. A., Harden, K. P., Tucker-Drob, E. M. (2014). Child characteristics and parental educational expectations: Evidence for transmission with transaction. Developmental Psychology, 50, 26142632. Google Scholar, Medline
Button, T. M., Lau, J. Y., Maughan, B., Eley, T. C. (2008). Parental punitive discipline, negative life events and gene–environment interplay in the development of externalizing behavior. Psychological Medicine, 38, 2939. Google Scholar, Medline
Conley, D., Rauscher, E., Dawes, C., Magnusson, P. K., Siegal, M. L. (2013). Heritability and the equal environments assumption: Evidence from multiple samples of misclassified twins. Behavior Genetics, 43, 415426 Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Coplan, R. J., Reichel, M., Rowan, K. (2009). Exploring the associations between maternal personality, child temperament, and parenting: A focus on emotions. Personality and Individual Differences, 46, 241246. Google Scholar, ISI
de Haan, A. D., Deković, M., van den Akker, A. L., Stoltz, S. E. M. J., Prinzie, P. (2013). Developmental personality types from childhood to adolescence: Associations with parenting and adjustment. Child Development, 84, 20152030. Google Scholar, Medline
Göllner, R., Roberts, B. W., Damian, R. I., Lüdtke, O., Jonkmann, K., Trautwein, U. (2017). Whose “storm and stress” is it? Parent and child reports of personality development in the transition to early adolescence. Journal of Personality, 85, 376387. Google Scholar, Medline
Harden, K. P., Tucker-Drob, E. M., Tackett, J. L. (2013). The Texas Twin Project. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 16, 385390. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Heath, A. C., Nyholt, D. R., Neuman, R., Madden, P. A., Bucholz, K. K., Todd, R. D.…Martin, N. G. (2003). Zygosity diagnosis in the absence of genotypic data: An approach using latent class analysis. Twin Research, 6, 2226. Google Scholar, Medline
Hu, L. T., Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6, 155. Google Scholar, ISI
Jaffee, S. R., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T. E., Polo-Tomas, M., Price, T. S., Taylor, A. (2004). The limits of child effects: Evidence for genetically mediated child effects on corporal punishment but not on physical maltreatment. Developmental Psychology, 40, 10471058. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
John, O. P., Naumann, L. P., Soto, C. J. (2008). Paradigm shift to the integrative Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and conceptual issues. In John, O. P., Robins, R. W., Pervin, L. A. (Eds.), Handbook of personality (pp.114158). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Google Scholar
Karraker, K. H., Coleman, P. K. (2005). The effects of child characteristics on parenting. In Parenting: An ecological perspective (2nd ed., pp. 147176). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Google Scholar
Keller, M. C., Coventry, W. L., Heath, A. C., Martin, N. G. (2005). Widespread evidence for non-additive genetic variation in Cloninger’s and Eysenck’s personality dimensions using a twin plus sibling design. Behavior Genetics, 35, 707721. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Klahr, A. M., Burt, S. A. (2014). Elucidating the etiology of individual differences in parenting: A meta-analysis of behavioral genetic research. Psychological Bulletin, 140, 544586. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Knafo, A., Plomin, R. (2006). Parental discipline and affection and children’s prosocial behavior: Genetic and environmental links. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 147164. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
McAdams, T. A., Gregory, A. M., Eley, T. C. (2013). Genes of experience: Explaining the heritability of putative environmental variables through their association with behavioural and emotional traits. Behavior Genetics, 43, 314328. Google Scholar, Medline
McBride, B. A., Schoppe, S. J., Rane, T. R. (2002). Child characteristics, parenting stress, and parental involvement: Fathers versus mothers. Journal of Marriage and Family, 64, 9981011. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2002.00998.x Google Scholar, ISI
McGue, M., Bouchard, T. J. (1984). Adjustment of twin data for the effects of age and sex. Behavior Genetics, 14, 325343. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Morris, A. S., Silk, J. S., Steinberg, L., Sessa, F. M., Avenevoli, S., Essex, M. J. (2002). Temperamental vulnerability and negative parenting as interacting predictors of child adjustment. Journal of Marriage and Family, 64, 461471. Google Scholar, ISI
Narusyte, J., Andershed, A. K., Neiderhiser, J. M., Lichtenstein, P. (2007). Aggression as a mediator of genetic contributions to the association between negative parent–child relationships and adolescent antisocial behavior. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 16, 128137. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Patterson, M. W., Cheung, A. K., Mann, F. D., Tucker-Drob, E. M., Harden, K. P. (2017). Multivariate analysis of genetic and environmental influences on parenting in adolescence. Journal of Family Psychology, 31, 532541. Google Scholar, Medline
Pike, A., McGuire, S., Hetherington, E. M., Reiss, D., Plomin, R. (1996). Family environment and adolescent depressive symptoms and antisocial behavior: A multivariate genetic analysis. Developmental Psychology, 32, 590603. Google Scholar
Plomin, R., DeFries, J. C., Loehlin, J. C. (1977). Genotype-environment interaction and correlation in the analysis of human behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 84, 309322. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Polderman, T. J. C., Benyamin, B., de Leeuw, C. A., Sullivan, P. F., van Bochoven, A., Visscher, P. M., Posthuma, D. (2015). Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies. Nature Genetics, 47, 702709. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Rietveld, M. J. H., van Der Valk, J. C., Bongers, I. L., Stroet, T. M., Slagboom, P. E., Boomsma, D. I. (2000). Zygosity diagnosis in young twins by parental report. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 3, 134141. Google Scholar
Rimfeld, K., Kovas, Y., Dale, P. S., Plomin, R. (2016). True grit and genetics: Predicting academic achievement from personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111, 780. Google Scholar, Medline
Sameroff, A. (2009). The transactional model. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Google Scholar
Scarr, S., McCartney, K. (1983). How people make their own environments: A theory of genotype→ Environment effects. Child Development, 54, 424435. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Smith, C. L. (2010). Multiple determinants of parenting: Predicting individual differences in maternal parenting behavior with toddlers. Parenting: Science and Practice, 10, 117. Google Scholar
Soto, C. J., John, O. P. (2009). Ten facet scales for the Big Five Inventory: Convergence with NEO PI-R facets, self-peer agreement, and discriminant validity. Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 8490. Google Scholar, ISI
Stern, M., Hildebrandt, K. A. (1986). Prematurity stereotyping: Effects on mother-infant interaction. Child Development, 57, 308315. Google Scholar, Medline
Turkheimer, E. (2000). Three laws of behavior genetics and what they mean. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 160164. Google Scholar, SAGE Journals, ISI
Turkheimer, E., Harden, K. P. (2014). Behavior genetic research methods. In Reis, H., Judd, C. (eds.), Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology, 2nd ed. (pp. 159187). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
van den Akker, A., Deković, M., Prinzie, P. (2010). Transitioning to adolescence: How changes in child personality and overreactive parenting predict adolescent adjustment problems. Development and Psychopathology, 22, 151163. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
van den Berg, S. M., de Moor, M. H. M., McGue, M., Pettersson, E., Terracciano, A., Verweij, K. J. H.…Boomsma, D. I. (2014). Harmonization of neuroticism and extraversion phenotypes across inventories and cohorts in the genetics of personality consortium: An application of item response theory. Behavior Genetics, 44, 295313. Google Scholar, Medline
Verhoeven, M., Junger, M., Van Aken, C., Deković, M., Van Aken, M. A. (2007). Parenting during toddlerhood: Contributions of parental, contextual, and child characteristics. Journal of Family Issues, 28, 16631691. Google Scholar, SAGE Journals, ISI
Webster-Stratton, C., Reid, M. J., Hammond, M. (2004). Treating children with early-onset conduct problems: Intervention outcomes for parent, child, and teacher training. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 33, 105124. Google Scholar, Medline, ISI
Wenk, R. E., Houtz, T., Brooks, M., Chiafari, F. A. (1992). How frequent is heteropaternal superfecundation? Acta geneticae medicae et gemellologiae: Twin Research, 41, 4347. Google Scholar

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