BYU study: Good parenting all about the right 'dad-itude'

PROVO — Your 6-year-old son comes down the stairs wearing a striped shirt, plaid pants and bright orange socks. Do you: A) march him back upstairs and require a change of clothes? B) ignore his outfit choice? Or C) compliment him on the initiative to get dressed on his own?

Dads who choose C exhibit more of a "child-oriented" parenting attitude, and will end up with healthier parent-child relationships than adults who pick the authoritarian, adult-oriented parenting style of choice A, says a new BYU study.

In fact, a dad's attitude is so important that it beat out birth order, the child's gender and even the child's language and social skills as one of the strongest predictors of a happy parent-child relationship, said Erin Holmes, lead author and assistant professor in the School of Family Life.

"The better way to create a good relationship is to think about their children's needs, their children's ideas and maybe even give their kids a little more room to make decisions on their own," she said. "Sometimes that even means your child might disagree with you as the parent. In that case, you need to be willing to listen to the child, find out why he thinks that (his) idea might be better."

Holmes and co-author, Aletha Huston at the University of Texas at Austin, came to this conclusion by observing 586 first-graders and their dads as they played SlapJack and drew a sailboat on an Etch-a-Sketch, with each of them using one knob.

"We created tasks that children couldn't do on their own because we wanted to invoke a little bit of stress, or pressure," Holmes explained. "Some of the fathers and children did exceptionally well. They would laugh, have a great time, and still find a way to see if they could accomplish (the task.)"

Researchers awarded no points for a completed sailboat, just taking notes about the child's persistence and if the father was supportive and promoted autonomy in the child – elements of a child-oriented mindset.

Fathers who had previously agreed with statements such as: "The most important thing to teach children is absolute obedience to whoever is in authority," and "Children must be carefully trained early in life or their natural impulses will make them unmanageable" had a less enjoyable play session, according to the study.

However, dads with adult-oriented mindsets could have more positive relationships if they viewed their first-grader as socially and verbally skilled. Child-oriented attitude dads didn't require such skills for good relationships.

But moms aren't left out of the equation, Holmes stresses. Families are complex, dynamic systems in which everyone influences everyone else.

"(I hope) mothers see that efforts they put into trying to create positive loving relationships with their kids are also influencing their husbands' likelihood of having the same quality relationship with their kids," Holmes said.

The study will be published in the academic journal, Fathering. It used data from a 15-year longitudinal study funded by The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

sisraelsen@desnews.com