Parenting and Child Mental Health

Abstract

Parenting behavior has a significant influence on children’s mental health and may contribute to the development of emotional or behavior problems in children. Differences in parenting behavior have been related to parent personality and to child temperament, although the direction of causality is not yet clear. This review seeks to provide an overview of the relation between child mental health, parenting, parent personality, and child temperament with a special focus on the interaction effects of parent personality on child temperament. Empirical evidence suggested that child and parent characteristics both—additively and interactively—contribute to parenting behavior. There were only a few studies that explicitly considered interaction effects, and most of them focused on negative effects. More research is necessary to investigate the interaction of parent personality and child temperament and the related child outcomes further. Counseling, family therapy, and other parenting-oriented interventions may benefit from individual adaptations to both parental personality and child temperament.