As children grow older, they become independent and are less likely to spend more time with their parents. However, a new study highlights the importance of parents in a child's personality development in all stages of growth and how teens benefit from the quality time they spend with their parents.
Investigators from the Pennsylvania State University found teens preferring to be with their parents these days and the time they spend with their parents helps them to improve their social skills and general self-worth. This comes as a contradiction to earlier studies that reported teens growing apart from their parents and spending less time with them.
The study published in the journal Child Development included and followed 200 white, middle and working class families, for seven years. All the families had two children, the eldest aged 11 and second one eight.
Home and phone interviews were conducted at five different stages of the study. During the interviews, the children talked about their social skills, general self-worth and also the persons with whom they spent most of their time.
Investigators noticed a considerable increase in the parent-teen time during early and middle adolescence.
"This suggests that, while adolescents become more separate from their families, they continue to have one-on-one opportunities to maintain close relationships with their parents," Susan McHale, professor of human development and director of the Social Science Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University, said in a statement.
McHale and colleagues also found teens who spent more time with their fathers and other having better social skills with their peers and those who spent more time exclusively with their parents having better general self-worth.
Apart from that, parents having both a son and a daughter were found spending more time with the same sex child.
