We all know that many things happen during our human life cycle – like marriage, births, deaths, careers, divorce, and many others. However, the foundation of life lies in childhood that can last for a lifetime. A study published in the Psychological Science section of the magazine in September 2016 stated that men who grew up in a warm and nurturing family environment tend to have strong relations in the future.
Robert Waldinger study
The research work published in the magazine is the continuation of Harvard University’s Study of Adult Development. The longitudinal study of adult health and well-being has spanned for almost eight decades now.
Male Harvard students and inner-city Boston teens were enrolled for the study in 1938. The researchers used interviews to rate the quality of the men’s family background and environment.
Many other researchers talked with the men in their midlife to understand how they manage negative emotions. Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and Marc Schulz, a psychologist at Bryn Mawr College, conducted a study with the men in their 80s to understand their relationship with their partners.
Waldinger and Schulz study
According to Waldinger and Schulz, the socioeconomic level of men doesn’t depend on behavior with their partner. It depends on the warmer family environment, leading them to share healthier bonds with their family. And the children, especially men, who are brought up in a healthy environment families have strong and hearty strategies to tackle their negative emotions in their midlife. They also tend to have strong bonds with their partners until late in their life.
According to the study results, the environment in which the men spend their childhood creates a significant impact on their adulthood and the rest of their life.
Another theory
A psychologist, Chris Fraley, of the University of Illinois studied attachment and was not part of the present study. He stated that so much happens in one’s life from childhood to adult age, that shapes one’s lifestyle and behavior. It can be anything from financial problems, bad childhood memory, divorce, or illness, which molds the person’s behavior with their partner in the old age.
This relation with the person’s present behavior to his past is an association which the researchers felt quite remarkable. But this association, however, raised a few questions in the minds of these researchers.
The result of the study
Schulz highlighted the research findings and explained that there is a need for the parents’ support and their need to create a healthy family environment for their children. He puts a lot of stress on the importance of social services to make your children understand how people live in inadequate and unsafe settings.
Schulz explained that the kids might not remember the events from their childhood, but they remember the loving and nurturing environment in the family. It shapes the life of the people and leaves a long term impact in their life.
Winding up
If you have had a rough childhood, you can work on it by working on developing a warmer and stable relationship as an adult. It would be probably best to learn how to use healthy strategies to deal with the negative emotions of life. Also, we must try to ensure that our children live in a better environment.
