Personality Characteristics Associated With Fathers' Attitudes Toward Child-Rearing1

There is little information in the literature on the personality characteristics of parents with differing attitudes toward child-rearing. The available information up to 1946 has been summarized by Radke (14). In the more recent literature, Shoben (I6) has demonstrated that the child-rearing attitudes expressed by mothers are related in a highly significant way to child adjustment-a finding supporting the usefulness of the attitude inventory as a technique for gathering information in this area. Harris, Gough, and Martin (8) with the same approach have found that the mothers of prejudiced children express child-rearing attitudes characterized by authoritarianism and lack of tolerance of children's 'annoyance-value'. Shapiro (15), dealing with a rather heterogeneous population, observed that restrictive child-rearing attitudes were associated with conservative political opinions. And in still another study using the questionnaire approach, Mark (ix) found the mothers of adult male schizophrenics expressed restrictive attitudes toward child behavior. These various findings, while important, are still too sparse a basis for an understanding of the parental personality as it impinges upon and interacts with the developing personality of the child. The present study, in addition to its value as a validity generalizing research, can be seen as an extension of previous work in two respects. First, it provides information about fathers whereas previous investigations have been essentially limited to the study of mothers. Second and of greater importance, the present study provides more direct and more widely ranging information about the personality characteristics of the parents investigated than has usually been obtained. While previous research has demon-