Abstract
This article of Wängqvist, Lamb, Frisén and Hwang, is about the first longitudinal research, which studies the relationship between the individuals’ development and their personalities. To do this, they studied the Big Five personality traits, which are agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience and conscientiousness. The research started in 1982, with 137 Swedish participants, from ages 2 years old to 29 years old.
They based their study on 3 major questions:
– Is the personality of the children and adolescents a predictor of adulthood personality?
– Is it related to the gender?
– Does it develop in a linear or curvilinear way?
For the first question, their hypotheses were that it is indeed a predictor of adulthood personality.
For the second question, they expected the difference between males and females to appear at the age of fifteen.
And for the third question, they thought there would be variations, but no hypotheses could be confirmed because there are some individual variations, and people change with time.
To specify their hypotheses, the participants completed two questionnaires: the Big Five Inventory and the California Child Q-test, which is an indicator of the emotions, behaviour, cognition, and the differences between the individuals. Using the software PASW, the researchers calculated the growth curves.
The results of the study confirmed the hypotheses. For example, women were significantly more extraverted and more neurotic than men, and a few years later, they showed more agreeableness than them.
To conclude this recapitulation, this first longitudinal study shows some new results, which could provide some new science questions to study in the future.
Focus
> How does the loss of a parent affect the child?
> What is the impact of this loss at adulthood?
I. Introduction
A lot of studies have been made about children’s mourning. They all agreed with the fact that it has a psychological and an emotional impact on the development of the child, and can have consequences on the adulthood. 1 adult out of 10 lost one of their parents in their childhood, and this happens especially in modest and large families.
II. Emotions
First, we are going to talk about the emotions that the child can feel after the loss of a parent.
A child is very affectively dependent on his family. When he loses a parent, the child can develop an anxious dependence. Indeed, he has to understand that the parent is not immortal, which is the illusion he had before. This can lead to strong anxiety. The child can feel guilty for the death, or have an existential crisis, while searching for the attention of the missing parent, without necessarily receiving it from someone else. Indeed, it’s difficult for these children to have all the attention they need for their own development, when one of the parents has passed away. In the future, the child will constantly be unsatisfied in his relationships, because he will find his entourage not present enough. Also, he will have difficulties investing in a friendship or a relationship, because of the fear of losing this person, which would remind him of the loss of his parent.
Concerning the child in his activities, he can become disorderly: he might not get involved in his hobbies like he used to, and have difficulties integrating with his peers.
It is difficult for the child to manage mourning because he has to deal with his emotional capacity, which is still in development. Indeed, he can’t handle the mourning like an adult would, so it is really difficult for him. The child won’t show any sadness, and he’ll be hyperactive. This can be interpreted as a defense mechanism, showing his anxiety of death. So we can say that the loss of a parent has an important cognitive impact.
III. Behavior
Now, we are going to talk about the changes in the child’s behavior. After the parent has passed away, the child can have behaviors that are close to the symptoms of depression. For example, he can have sleeping issues, difficulty falling asleep, some nightmares, or need the presence of an adult to fall asleep… All these difficulties make the child postpone the moment of going to bed, and enhance the fear of losing the other parent. Indeed, 40% of the children who have lost a parent develop a major depression, particularly if they are under 11.
The child can develop a caring compulsion. This means that he will be very, even too invested, in the resolution of conflicts in his circle. This role of “savior” will follow him all his life, and he’ll be unable to stop it.
IV. Development
Finally, we are going to talk about the consequences of mourning on the child’s development. It has been shown that a child who loses a parent before 5 years old has more risk of complications in his development in the long term, and it can get worse with the accumulation of negative events. For example, there could be a change in his environment, such as placement in an institution. All these tensions in the child’s personal life can lead to school failure, and the difficulty of accessing a degree. We can differentiate 4 parts in the child’s mourning. The first one is revolt. It corresponds to the fear and the anger of the child, during the hours and weeks after the death. The second one is denial. It is when the child refuses to believe that the parent has passed away. It is an unconscious defense mechanism. The third one is a period of depression. If the sadness and the pain are too much to bear, the child can wish to join the dead parent. This can lead to dangerous behaviors. The fourth and last part is reorganization. It means that the child adapts to his life without the parent. He changes his ideas, his behaviors, etc… He finally understands that he will have to live without his father or mother.
Opinion and conclusion
To put it in a nutshell, we can say that behavior can change in many ways during a lifetime. A tragic event can totally change the individual, and have a major impact on his mind. However, behavior also depends on the context and the environment in which the individual lives, so it develops at different rhythms, and in different ways. We think that the butterfly effect in this article is quite surprising. The loss of a parent always has an impact on the child’s adulthood, and mourning can continue all his life, affecting his choices in life.
In professional literature, there aren’t many articles that deal with the consequences of mourning on a child’s personality. This can be explained by the fact that it is difficult to study children’s personalities. Also, most of the studies useauto-evaluation, which isn’t really adapted for young children, because they are too young to answer the test questions. So, the fact that the parents and teachers are doing it for them might bias the test.
Wängqvist, M., Lamb, M. E., Frisén, A., Hwang, C. P. (2015). Child and Adolescent Predictors of Personality in Early Adulthood. Child Dev, 86(4), 1253-1261.
Yannick Ménard, Alexis Longchamp, Chloe Henry