Controlling Parents? Mean Kids
Listen up, helicopter parents (and yes, that means me). A new study says controlling parents create mean college kids. College students whose parents lay on the guilt or try to manipulate them may translate feelings of stress into similar mean behavior with their own friends, a new study by a University of Vermont psychologist has found. Those students’ physical response to stress influences the way they will carry out that hostility – either immediately and impulsively or in a cold, calculated way, concludes Jamie Abaied, a UVM assistant professor of psychological science, newswise.com reports. Abaied looked at the link between “parental psychological control” and the young adults’ relationships with peers. Even after they leave home as legal adults, college students often still depend on parents for financial, as well as emotional, support. Some parents will nit-pick and find fault or threaten to withdraw affection (or money) as punishment or to force a desire...