Continuity of the parental styles through the generations

Abstract

Parental practices have been investigated during decades and they are considered as important predictive factors in the child development and they provide a model of parental interaction with their children. This research had as objective to investigate the intergenerational transmission of the parental styles. Interviews were conducted with 21 women, from seven distinct families, respecting the trigenerational linearity, using the Adult Attachment Interview developed by George, Kaplan e Main and the Scales of Quality of Familiar Interaction Scales - EQIF of Weber and colaborators. It was used for the data analysis the non-parametric test Mann-Whitney U. Intergenerational transmission was found in 91.7% of the cases. From first to third generation the data showed that fathers were sensibly more authoritarian than the mothers and that they were more submissive. These results show that it is necessary to divulgate the adequated parenting practices as one prevention strategie.