A new science of parenthood

Descripción del proyecto

El intrincado entramado de la paternidad y el comportamiento social

La paternidad conlleva transformaciones. ¿Cómo cambian las personas cuando se convierten en padres? ¿Por qué no todo el mundo destaca en el cuidado de sus hijos? ¿Por qué los padres primerizos pierden el contacto con sus amigos íntimos o se sitúan en un segundo plano? El equipo del proyecto PAR2, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, traslada el centro de atención para considerar la paternidad como motor del cambio social y del desarrollo y la crianza de los hijos como una forma singular de comportamiento social. Mediante estudios longitudinales que abarcan decenios, en PAR2 se examina la evolución de las habilidades socioemocionales y el comportamiento social en personas con y sin hijos. El equipo identificará las influencias de la familia, la pareja, los amigos y los genes en el comportamiento parental, lo que desafiará las ideas tradicionales. Los resultados ayudarán a redefinir nuestra comprensión del desarrollo humano.

Objetivo

How does life, how does a person change when one becomes a parent? Are new parents really lost as close friends? Are they actually better listeners because they have learned to put themselves second? Why are some parents caring and attuned to their children’s needs when others struggle? It is surprising that researchers have so far overlooked the transition to parenthood as a driver for social-developmental change and have hardly zoomed in on parenting as social behaviour. Like any other social behaviour, substantial individual differences can be found between parents but research has neglected various likely determinants. PAR2 changes this by 1) elucidating whether, indeed, parents develop differently in the social realm compared to people without children, and 2) using the methodological tools of social development research to test why parents differ in the ways they parent.
To achieve this, we compare parents and people without children on social-emotional skills and social behaviour using longitudinal cohorts that span multiple decades across adolescence and adulthood (WP1). How parenting behaviour -as a unique social behaviour in adulthood- is being shaped under different circumstances and in different people, is central in work packages 2-4. We use longitudinal social networks (WP2), multiple-generation cohorts (WP3), and social genome data (WP4) to understand the influence of 1) family, partner, friends, and other parents, 2) social relationships prior to becoming a parent, and 3) own, partner, and child genes on parenting.
PAR2 significantly innovates research on social development by explicitly conceptualizing parenthood as a crucial transition and parenting as social behaviour. Viewing parenthood as driver of developmental change and parenting as social behaviour means that PAR2 generates a novel direction in research and will result in significant theoretical and methodological innovation to our understanding of variation in human development.