Parenting with Style: Warmth; Control; Involvement

School's out for Summer!  The kids are home all day and parents are growing in appreciation for teachers with each passing moment!

In honor of this, That's Psych! will focus on Parenting Styles for the month of June.

Psychologists usually evaluate parenting based on three dimensions: Warmth; Control; and Involvement.  Warmth has to do with how much parents express the love that they feel for their children. This love can be expressed through praising children when they do something well, hugs and kisses, saying, "I love you," and keeping things positive around the kids - shielding them from the ups and downs of the adults' own lives.  If parents frequently do these things, they are getting it right!  These parents would be considered to be High in Warmth.

On the other hand, parents who are Low in Warmth, may love their children, but they do not show it very much.  Instead they may appear stern, they are not very affectionate and rarely say "I love you," and if they have a bad day, they take it out on their kids by being grumpy around them.

Control has to do with discipline:  does the parent have rules and, if those rules are broken, is there some kind of consequence?  The parents who get it right, are considered to be Medium in Control.  This means that they have rules, but these are age-appropriate and sensible.  It also means that when these rules are broken, there is some sort of consequence, but this punishment is also age-appropriate and sensible.  These parents are really interested in teaching children the moral, or the reason, behind the rules.  For example, you don't hit people because it is not okay to hurt others.

In contrast, parents who are High in Control have too many rules and they often expect their children to behave as if they are older than they really are.  If expectations are too high, it means that the kids will often fail at following these rules; a parent who is High in Control also gives very harsh punishment as a consequence.  These parents are really interested in their children obeying authority: it does not matter why there is a rule, if an adult tells you to do something you must do it.

We can also find parents who are very Low in Control.  These parents either don't have rules or have very few rules for their children.  It may be that they don't expect enough from their children as they grow up.  If a rule is broken, these parents rarely have consequences for their children, or the punishment is so light that it has little effect.  These parents aren't interested in playing a role in shaping their children's behavior by teaching right from wrong.

In addition to Warmth and Control, parents can also differ in the amount of Involvement that they have in their children's lives.  Parents who are High in Involvement really know their children:  they know what is happening in their daily lives and in their inner lives.  For example, a parent who is High in Involvement would know the names of the child's friends and teachers, the child's favorite and most despised foods,  and what scares the child the most.  These parents spend quality time with their children and, just like Involvement, usually get Warmth and Control right.

A parent who is Low in Involvement would not know the details of the child's daily life or emotional life.  Often these parents spend little quality time with their children, and are likely to show problems with Warmth and Control.

In the next four blog posts, we'll feature the different types of parents and how they stack up on Warmth, Control, and by association, Involvement.  Parenting styles are in fashion this June!

Further Reading:

Want some ideas about showing High Warmth to your kids?  The Baby Center has ideas for young children and Psychology Today has ideas for teens.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has a website for parents: healthychildren.org .  Look here for good suggestions about discipline and how to be Medium in Control.

Related to Involvement, here is an article from The Daily Telegraph that includes 25 questions to ask your children. 

The "Me" in Meme

If you Google "meme" you will find that the term originated in the 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene," by Richard Dawkins (not to be confused with 1976 gameshow host, Richard Dawson) as a way to explain how cultural information can be transmitted through generations in our DNA.  In fact the word meme comes from a Greek word meaning "to imitate."  Internet Memes, like the ones featured on this blog, are distant cousins of this original, biological definition but also tell us about our culture.

When I teach at my university, I purposely search for photographs that represent people from different races, ethnicities, sexes, sexual orientations, and ages to illustrate my lectures.  I want my lessons to reflect the diverse human experience so that all of my students will see a glimpse of themselves in at least some of those images.  Another person who thinks that visual images matter is CEO of Facebook and founder of Leanin.org, Sheryl Sandberg.  Sandberg commissioned a set of more modern and diverse images of women to combat old-fashioned, sexist images or ridiculous favorites like the Tumblr-worthy "women laughing alone with salad."  The collection is introduced this way:

A picture is worth a thousand words. But in an age where visuals are everywhere, what message are those pictures sending? Much of the imagery we see daily portrays a familiar trope: men leading, women sidelined or sexualized, and mom and dad in stereotypical roles. But that paradigm is shifting. LeanIn.Org and Getty Images have teamed up to create the Lean In Collection—a library of thousands of creative images devoted to the powerful depiction of women and girls, families of all kinds, and men as caretakers as well as earners. These images are updated monthly. The goal is to shift perceptions, overturn cliches, and incorporate authentic images of women and men into media and advertising. Join us to help close the image gender gap—one photo at a time.

So as I curate this blog, I would like to show diverse people in memes.  This is proving to be difficult:  the groups that tend to be underrepresented in other forms of popular media also are harder to find in the meme world.  Even worse, when I do find images of women, people of color, senior citizens, people with disabilities, they are often portrayed in negative, stereotypical ways.

For this post I decided to document this phenomenon by using Google Image to search for "top memes."  Here are first 50 results:

I tabulated the characteristics of the main person featured in the meme.  If there were two people in the meme, I noted the features of the person who is portrayed to be speaking or highlighted by the text.  Based on my first impressions, here is what I found in these top 50 memes:

Seventy percent of the memes featured males; 24% featured females; and the remaining percent were unclear or featured an object (although this object was a male action figure toy).

Eighty percent of the memes featured a White person; 10% featured a Black person and 10% featured an Asian person; 2% featured a Middle Eastern person and 2% featured a Native American; while the remaining percent was an object (although this object was a White action figure toy).

Forty-two percent of the memes featured a young adult (ages 18-39); 26% featured a baby or a child; 18% featured a middle-aged person (ages 40-59); 6% featured a teenager (ages 13-17) and 6% featured an older person (ages 60+); with the remaining percent from an object (although this object was an action figure toy portraying a young adult or midlife man).

If we compare these results to data from the Pew Research Center about Social Media - where these memes would be shared - we see some mismatches.  For our example let's look at Facebook, the most popular social media platform with 71% of all Internet users logging on (like us on Facebook here!).  Here are the 2014 Facebook Demographics about Internet users:

66% of these males and 71% of these females are on Facebook.
71% of White users are on Facebook; 67% Black users; 73% Hispanic log on to Facebook.
87% of ages 18-29; 74% ages 30-49; 63% ages 50-64; and 56% ages 65+ are Facebook users.

If the basis of a meme is to tell us something about our culture - even something as simple as what is funny - the messages may over-represent males and Whites compared to their audience.  The premise of this blog is that these pop culture memes often contain ideas that are backed up by psychology - so what does it mean if these memes mostly portray certain types of people?

With the majority of midlife and older adults logging on to social media, this also means that they will be less likely to see their images illustrating these messages.  Young adults won out in meme representation and in social media use, but they are not featured in memes to the extent that they are a presence on Facebook.  If they are also the ones making these memes, it is interesting that babies and children are relatively popular choices of theirs to serve as their messengers.

My count of these memes is not science at its best, but it illustrates a phenomenon that we see elsewhere in media:  the image is male, White, and young adult.  For example, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that, in the top 100 films of 2012, speaking roles were played by:  men (77%); Whites (76%); young adults (49%).  Expanding on the words of The Status of Women in U.S. Media in 2014, we may conclude that:

Unequivocally, it matters when [we] get our just due across the vast media landscape. Only when [we all] are equal partners in the multi-layered work of deciding what constitutes a story and how that story might be told can we paint a more textured, accurate picture of the worlds that we all...inhabit. (p.5).

Further Reading:

View the entire Lean In stock photo collection here.

Want to make some more diverse memes?  Try these online tools:  Meme Generator; imgflip; or imgur.

The Women's Media Center has excellent resources about how sex, gender, race, and age are portrayed in American media.

Now I Can Get Fat

At first glance this week's meme made me groan because joking about women and weight is really only funny anymore if delivered by Amy Schumer with a critical jab toward our culture.

However, as a life-span developmental psychologist, I began to wonder...do women and men gain weight after they say "I do"?  Apparently the answer is yes - although the amount is debated.  Some studies, regardless of other factors that influence weight, find a gain of about 5 lbs (2.28 kg) amongst young adult newlyweds and others estimate the gain to be up to 20 lbs (9 kg) if we follow those married young adults through midlife.

Meltzer, Novak, McNulty, Butler, and Karney (2013) devised a study to evaluate this weight gain against two competing theories to explain this trend.  The first theory is the Health Regulation Model: the argument here is that marriage encourages us to take care of each other.  If our marriage going well, we would be more likely to go to the doctor, floss, eat well, and by extension maintain a healthy weight.  Because marital satisfaction tends to decline within the first few years, that health maintenance would also decline leading to skipping the doctor, forgetting to floss, eating junk food, and by extension gaining weight.

The alternate theory is featured in our meme:  it is supposed to be funny because the bride has snagged her man and no longer has to worry about looking a certain way to attract a mate.  This is the premise of the Mating Market Model: if our marriage is going well we may gain weight because we are not interested in finding a new mate; if our marriage is going poorly we may lose weight because we are gearing up to attract a new partner within a culture that values thinness.

Meltzer et al. tracked more than 100 heterosexual young adult couples (average age 24 - which is younger than the average age of first marriage in the U.S.) for four years after their marriages.  These participants were asked to complete questionnaires about their marital satisfaction and to self-report their heights and weights to calculate their Body Mass Indexes (BMIs).  After controlling for pregnancy and childbirth, the trend of weight gain after marriage was confirmed: both men and women gained some weight after marriage, but weight gain was not in the unhealthy range.  So our meme may be correct about weight gain but incorrect to imply that only women may experience this after marriage.

Lending strength to the Mating Market Model and to our meme, the authors also found that participants who reported greater marital satisfaction were more likely to report weight gain.  If our bride (and groom) match the demographics of the Meltzer et al. study, perhaps they have the right to be smug: if they are happy with their marriage they may gain some weight and not care a bit.  The Mating Market Model was further supported by another trend in their data: when participants reported that they were "thinking of divorce" they also tended to report a lower BMI than usual.

Interestingly, unlike thoughts of divorce, levels of overall marital stress did not correlate with changes in BMI.  Using the Health Regulations Model we would have expected the couples who reported less marital stress to have steady or lower BMIs, but no such relationship was found.  The authors note this as further evidence on the side of the Mating Market Model.

However, is marriage a leading correlate of weight gain?  Currently about 51% of American adults are married (happily and otherwise) while 69% of American adults are overweight.  Thus, there must be other factors involved.  Also, if the majority of American heterosexual adults get married at some point and the majority of American adults are overweight, it also stands to reason that you don't have to be thin to get married in the first place.  If you find happiness with another person just count your lucky stars instead of counting the numbers on the scale.

Further Reading:

The Meltzer et al. (2013) study can be accessed through your local college library or as a free pdf via Research Gate.

A piece by NPR that casts a critical view on the use of BMI as an accurate assessment of weight and health.

Information about body image from the National Eating Disorder Association.  Their website has links to lots of excellent resources including this one about Size Diversity.

Find good information about health, food, and fitness from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
A post by Samantha Joel on the Science of Relationships blog:  What makes a good spouse based on psychological research.  See if you and your partner have what it takes.

Give In...to Gender Transcendence

If I could be Queen of the World one of my wishes would be for everyone to have the freedom of Gender Role Transcendence meaning that we would each do and like what we are good at and what interests us and not worry if people of our gender or sex are "supposed to" do or like those things in our culture.   One fellow who seems to have achieved this is featured in this week's meme:

This meme is a play on a quotation from "Star Wars:  Return of the Jedi" in which Darth Vader's BFF, The Emperor Palpatine, goads Luke Skywalker by saying, "Give in to your anger."  The humor comes from portraying the Dark Side's most famous General in a stereotypically feminine way:  we associate being emotional (but not being angry); knitting; the color pink; sitting in a closed position; crafting; and the word "pretty" with the feminine gender role.  Since Darth Vader does not seem to care if he is breaking gender stereotypes or not, he is just doing something that he enjoys, we can say that he is showing Gender Role Transcendence.

How would an average man, not a Sith Lord, develop Gender Role Transcendence?  Gender Role Journey Theory proposes that adults move from buying into our culture's gender roles, to having mixed feelings about them, this ambivalence gives way to anger about these roles which can spur actions to fights those roles, and finally transcendence, meaning that they can be whatever mix of those gender roles that suits who they really are (O'Neil & Carroll, 1988).

A recent article by McDermott and Schwartz (2013) used a measure based on this theory to categorize young adult men (ages 18-36) into four groups that represent four stages toward Gender Role Transcendence:  Not Questioning/Accepting of Traditional Gender Roles; Questioning With Strong Ambivalence (confusion and fear); Questioning With Weak Ambivalence (confusion and fear); and Pro-Feminist Activities.  The authors did not find evidence that any of their participants had moved into the final stage of transcendence, but they did discover that the men who were the closest to it - the participants in the Pro-Feminist Activities category - tended to be older.  This suggests that few men in their 20s or 30s are likely to be in Gender Role Transcendence - instead in this sample 70% of the men were Questioning With either Strong or Weak Ambivalence.  However with increasing age we would guess that more of those men would reach Gender Role Transcendence.  True to our meme, the wisdom of the Internet estimates Darth Vader's age at death to be 45; as a midlife man he would be more likely to have reached that state of mind.

The men in the Pro-Feminist subgroup were also more likely to be married or engaged (to women).  This is a classic example of a positive correlation because we do not know what is causing these two traits to hang together.  It could be, as McDermott and Schwartz suggest, that these men, "...may have learned to be flexible in their gender role ideology as part of navigating intimate relationships [with women]" (p. 208).  On the other hand, it may be that viewing women as equals (Pro-Feminist ideology) makes you an appealing partner to women for committed relationships.  It could also be a third variable: most heterosexual adults get married in their late 20s or 30s, so increased age might separately encourage men to view women as equals AND encourage them to get engaged/married.  So we cannot be sure if Darth Vader's marriage to Padmé Amidala was a cause of, a result of, or just a coincidence with his Gender Role Transcendence.

If you - male, female, or anyone in between - are looking to transcend the roles that our culture has assigned to your sex or gender you don't need to have mastered The Force.  My best advice is to just be yourself - which, by the way, does get easier as you get older.  If you need further encouragement, here are a young Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack singing on the 1970s children's television special, "Free to Be You and Me."

Further Reading:

You can access the McDermott and Schwartz (2013) article at your local college library.

A Master's Thesis in Cultural Psychology by John Pianka (2013):  "The Power of the Force: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in the Star Wars Universe."  Darth Vader may have transcended gender in our meme, but gender stereotypes are plentiful in the series.

The Huffington Post ran an article on men and knitting: "Bros and Rows."  This was also published in 2013!

Driving While Old

My husband and I have made a pact:  when we are Senior Citizens we will remind each other that we probably do not drive as well as we think we do.  As noted in this meme, it is not uncommon for older Seniors to make certain driving errors, such as driving too slowly:

According to the National Institutes of Health, other common driving errors in later life are, "failing to yield the right of way, failing to stay in your lane, misjudging the time or distance needed to turn in front of traffic, failing to stop completely at a stop sign, and speeding...."  Surprisingly, there are not many studies in psychology that link specific age-related changes in thinking (cognition) to specific driving errors.

One such study was done in Australia by Anstey and Wood (2011) who recruited 266 volunteers between the ages of 70-88 who reported that they drove at least once a week on a regular basis.  These Seniors took a battery of cognitive tests and also went for a 50 minute drive supervised by an instructor, and accompanied by an occupational therapist who noted any driving errors that occurred.

Some of their results replicated past research.  For example, all driving errors quadrupled with increasing age of participant - so my husband and I will have less to worry about when we are in our 70s compared to our 80s.  Also, there were no gender effects - so we will not be able to predict if my husband or I will be the safer driver; although women tend to outlive men so I am more likely to make it well into my 80s and thus up my risk of driving errors!

The factor that predicted the majority of the errors was called "Speeded Attention and Switching" and was made up of results from various tests of two specific cognitive processes that slow with aging:  speed of processing and task switching ability.  Speed of processing is how quickly you are able to recognize and understand how to react to new information that is coming your way.  Task switching ability is how well you are able to quickly and accurately switch your attention between two activities.  Because driving causes us all to encounter new information quickly (a dog runs into the street, the car ahead of us suddenly brakes, a cloudburst makes the pavement slick) and provides us many competing tasks (staying in our lane, obeying the speed limit, looking for road signs and stoplights) it is sensible that declines in these skills would correlate with driving errors.

One of these errors, "brake/accelerator problems" - which include driving too quickly or too slowly - returns us to our meme.  The Senior Romeo may be driving too slowly if it takes him longer to know where to focus his attention and longer for him to switch where his attention lies...especially if he is highly motivated to pay attention to his hot date!  By slowing down he may buy himself some time to compensate for these cognitive declines, which may give him the impression that he is still driving safely.

So if you have older relatives (or dates!) you may have some concerns about their driving.  This is especially likely if they are over age 80: "People 80 and older are involved in 5.5 times as many fatal crashes per mile driven as middle-­aged drivers."  However, more concern should be given to the teens in your life: "the crash rate for driver ages 16and 17...is almost nine times as high as that for middle-aged driver."  If you are middle aged you probably make few driving errors, but be careful - you are likely to be distracted as you worry about your Senior parents' and your adolescent children's driving.

Further Reading:

The Anstey and Wood (2011) journal article can be accessed through your local college library.

Test your own Speed of Processing!  The results will report your accuracy and speed at solving these novel problems.

How to talk to a Senior about safe driving. The NIH has some excellent ideas to get the conversation started.

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has an official online dating site for Seniors.  You can talk about today's blog on your first date!