The Ripple Effects of Good Parenting

Compassionate caregiving can shape multiple generations.

If you’re like me and have no idea what day it is, you may not have noticed that today’s newsletter is a day late. But it is — and that’s because the research I am sharing today was under embargo until a few hours ago.

When I heard about this new study, I got so excited because it illustrates one of the key reasons I write this newsletter: The way we parent can change the world. When we treat our children with warmth and support, we in essence “pay it forward.” We build kinder generations because compassion is contagious.

This message feels especially powerful because patient and thoughtful parenting can feel unappreciated and inconsequential. When your kid screams because you served their sandwich on the green plate instead of the blue one, and you take a deep breath and validate their frustration and they just keep crying, it can feel like the kindness you’ve gone to great lengths to muster is pointless. Like it’s just been sucked into a giant black hole and makes no difference to anyone, anywhere.

But this new research suggests that our day-to-day choices can be incredibly meaningful¹. They often work in invisible ways but can have powerful ripple effects, even generations down the line.

The new study was just published in the journal Child Development. Researchers at the University of Virginia followed 184 adolescents from the age of 13 until they were in their mid-30s — quite an undertaking! — assessing a number of different interactions and variables over time.

When the adolescents were 13, the researchers invited them into the lab with their mothers. They then observed as the teen asked their mother for help with a problem. The researchers analyzed how well the mothers connected with their teens, recognized and understand their teen’s problem, provided their teen with emotional support (for instance through expressing understanding and naming their emotions), and helped to solve their problem. 

Each year from when the teens were 13 through the age of 19, the researchers also invited each teen and their closest friend into the lab and observed what happened when the teen’s friend asked them for help with a problem. The researchers assessed the same factors they’ed looked for in the teens’ mothers: how well the teen connected with their friend, recognized and understand their friend’s problem, provided their friend with emotional support and helped to solve their problem. 

Then, years later, when those teens had their own children between the ages of 3 and 8, the researchers conducted a series of additional assessments. They asked the teens-turned-adults how they tended to respond to their kids’ negative emotions — for instance, what they would do if their child lost a favorite possession and burst into tears. The teens-turned-adults also completed a 79-item questionnaire that assessed their young kids’ developing social skills and behavior, including how often the kids showed empathy by trying to understand how others feel and trying to comfort others.

What the researchers found was fascinating and powerful: The more empathetic mothers were with their 13-year-olds, the more those 13-year-olds showed compassion for their close friends throughout adolescence. The supportiveness they showed in their adolescent friendships also predicted how supportive those teens would become, as adults, with their own kids, and it predicted how empathetic they thought their young kids were.

“If we want to raise empathic kids, we need to give them first-hand experiences of being understood and supported,” said study co-author Jessica Stern, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, in a Q&A published by the Society for Research in Child Development. As for why and how compassionate caregiving causes kids to become more compassionate themselves, there are likely a number of pathways. For one thing, kids learn appropriate behavior through our modeling. And when kids’ emotional needs are met, they then have the capacity to respond to others in more sensitive and empathetic ways.

Other recent studies support the idea that thoughtful, sensitive parenting makes kids kinder. In a study published in 2016, researchers at Penn State and the University of California Riverside surveyed mothers about their toddlers’ behavior and the way they typically responded to their toddlers’ negative feelings. They also observed the moms and kids together in the lab after the children were made to feel disappointed by being given a gift they didn’t want. They found that the kids whose moms helped them problem-solve while upset developed better emotional regulation skills over time and became more compassionate and helpful.

And in a 2019 study, researchers found that when mothers made an effort to help their toddlers manage stressful situations, those kids, one year later, were more likely than others to comfort a researcher who acted like she had been hurt.

When parents respond warmly and kindly to their children’s needs, their kids can then recognize — and respond to — needs they observe in others. 

The new study also points to the importance of adolescent friendships in providing a sort of “training ground” in which teens can learn and practice key relationship skills, drawing from their relationship with their parents. This practice ultimately helps them become better parents.

Other research has pointed to the importance of adolescent friendships in shaping future romantic relationship skills and happiness. In a 2019 study, researchers followed 165 kids from ages 13 to 30. They found that a key predictor of romantic life satisfaction in adulthood was the quality of their adolescent friendships, not their adolescent romances.

Specifically, they found that the more assertive 13-year-olds were with their peers, and the more positively they believed their peers would judge them across various situations, the more satisfied these teens became in their adult romantic relationships. Teens’ overall social competence at ages 15 and 16, and their ability to form and maintain strong close friendships between the ages of 16 and 18, also predicted future romantic relationship satisfaction.

All of these social skills are at least somewhat a product of parenting. Children who have been raised by supportive caregivers are more likely to experience a range of benefits throughout their lives — and can then pass these skills and benefits onto everyone else they engage with.

Warm and compassionate parenting is like a manifestation of the butterfly effect: Our daily kindnesses are like the flap of a butterfly’s wings, shaping other people’s lives in powerful and unexpected ways.

What are your thoughts? Share in the comments!

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1. This does not, however, mean that we need to be perfect parents. There are real benefits to being imperfect. Mistakes are powerful opportunities for repair and modeling, and it’s important for our kids to see that everyone is always a work in progress. I like to say that parenting gives us infinite opportunities to make thoughtful, compassionate choices; we do not need to (and should not!) take advantage of every single one of them to be a good parent.