Department of Human and Community Development, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2012 Nov;48(6):1570-4. doi: 10.1037/a0027599. Epub 2012 Mar 19.
Evidence that the transition to parenthood is occurring at older ages in the Western world, that older parents provide more growth-facilitating care than do younger ones, and that most prospective studies of the intergenerational transmission of parenting have focused on relatively young parents led us to evaluate whether parental age might moderate-and attenuate-the intergenerational transmission of parenting. On the basis of the seemingly commonsensical assumption that as individuals age they often become more psychologically mature and have more opportunity to reflect upon and free themselves from the legacy of childhood experiences, we hypothesized that deferring parenting would weaken links between rearing experiences in the family of origin and parenting in the family of procreation. To test this proposition we repeated analyses reported by Belsky, Jaffee, Sligo, Woodward, and Silva (2005) on 227 parents averaging 23 years of age linking rearing experiences repeatedly measured from 3 to 15 years of age with observed parenting in adulthood; we added 273 participants who became parents at older ages than did those in the original sample. Although previously reported findings showing that rearing history predicted mothering but not fathering reemerged, parental age generally failed to moderate the intergenerational transmission of parenting. Other investigators prospectively following children and adults into adulthood and studying the intergenerational transmission process should determine whether these null results vis-à-vis the attenuation of transmission with age obtain when parents with older children are studied or when other methods are used. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
有证据表明，在西方世界，人们正逐渐晚婚晚育，年长的父母比年轻的父母提供更多有利于孩子成长的照顾，而且大多数关于代际传递的前瞻性研究都集中在相对年轻的父母身上，这促使我们评估父母年龄是否会调节——并减弱——代际传递的育儿方式。基于一个看似合理的假设，即随着个体年龄的增长，他们通常会变得更加心理成熟，并有更多的机会反思和摆脱童年经历的影响，我们假设推迟育儿会削弱原生家庭养育经历和生育家庭养育之间的联系。为了验证这一假设，我们重复了 Belsky、Jaffee、Sligo、Woodward 和 Silva（2005）的分析，该分析基于 227 名平均年龄为 23 岁的父母，他们将从 3 岁到 15 岁反复测量的养育经历与成年后的观察到的育儿方式联系起来；我们还增加了 273 名比原始样本中更早成为父母的参与者。尽管先前报告的研究结果表明，养育史预测了母亲的养育方式，但不能预测父亲的养育方式，但这些结果再次出现，父母年龄普遍不能调节代际传递的育儿方式。其他前瞻性地跟踪儿童和成年人进入成年期并研究代际传递过程的研究人员应该确定，当研究有年长子女的父母或使用其他方法时，这些关于年龄衰减的传递的无效结果是否适用。（PsycINFO 数据库记录（c）2012 APA，保留所有权利）。
