Believe it or not, the old saying ‘like mother, like daughter’ is still very true and alive.

A recent study by researchers at Ohio State University on parenting reported an interesting finding. It claimed that women are more likely to follow how their parents practiced parenting than men.

The said survey based its report on findings from 1,133 young parents who were asked various questions. Some of the questions were on how frequently they spanked their children, how often they displayed affection to their children and how frequently they read to their children in the recent weeks. The researchers chose their subjects from a particular group whose parents had participated in a nationwide survey that started way back in 1979.

The research was able to establish the fact that mothers learn a lot about the parenting activities of their own mothers whereas fathers don’t follow their mothers as much. For all three behaviors — spanking children, giving physical affection/praise, and reading to children — women closely followed what their mothers did. This was not the case among men, the study authors found.

It is established that most mothers in the period under study (i.e. 1970s and 1980s) stayed home to parent their children. It is also true that though a lot of women were entering the workforce then, majority of them still did a lot of parenting their children. Despite these facts however, the fathers under study did not learn parenting from their mothers.

A lot more is still to be learnt about how fathers learn parenting.

B. Smart is a mother of four children, a professional teacher with more than 17 years experience of teaching and counselling children as well as teenagers. Her every day life is exposed to different sides of children/teenagers from diverse backgrounds. Learn a lot about behavioural changes of children and young adults at her Learn a lot about site.