DAVIS, Calif., Feb. 13 (UPI) -- Children who grow up in anti-social families are more likely to be anti-social themselves, according to a U.S. study.
In an effort to determine how anti-social behavior in one generation is transmitted to the next, researchers at the University of California-Davis and Virginia Tech looked at 430 adolescents and their biological parents across the children's high school years.
The researchers concluded that the children learned anti-social behavior by observing and interpreting their parents' anti-social behavior. Parents' behavior provides children with a model for their own behavior, and children's perception that a parent is anti-social may be a key component in choosing and validating their own behaviors, giving children permission to engage in this type of behavior.
For the teenagers in this study, the recognition of anti-social behavior in their parents played an important role in increasing their risk for similar conduct; in fact, it played more of a role than the teens' assessment of their parents' parenting abilities, according to the study published in the January/February 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.
