Family: Parents Misjudge The Happiness Of Their Children

Do you really know how happy your children are?

New findings published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology reveal that parents' estimation of their child's feelings vary greatly based on their child's own assessment of his or her feelings.

Psychologists at Plymouth University found that parents of 10 and 11-year-olds often overestimated their child's happiness. However, parents with 15 and 16-year-olds were likely to underestimate their child's happiness.

"Studying informants' discrepancies and the relationship between parents' and children's self-reports on happiness is vital to determine whether parental report is valid," study author Dr. Belén López-Pérez, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Developmental and Social Psychology at Plymouth University, said in a news release. 

Researchers believe that an "egocentric bias" may be to blame for such discrepancies, in which parents rely too heavily on their own feelings in assessing the happiness of the family unit as a whole.

In this study, researchers questioned a total of 357 children and adolescents from two different schools in Spain about their parents, with their happiness assessment based primarily on self-reporting measures and ratings.

The study findings revealed that parents were inclined to score a child or adolescents' happiness very similar to what they were feeling. However, there were typically quite notable differences in reality.

"Being unable to read children's happiness appropriately may increase misunderstanding between parents and children/adolescents, which has been shown to have negative consequences for parent-child relationships,"
he concluded. "Furthermore, parents might not be able to provide the appropriate emotional support or attend to their children's needs accurately."

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