![]() International Review of Psychiatry, 14, 143-154. Ginsburg GS & Schlossberg MC (2002) Family-based treatment of childhood anxiety disorders. One implication of this argument is that it may be more difficult for anxious fathers to alleviate their children’s anxiety, because a father’s anxiety will hinder their own role in exploring the external world and interacting with others – behaviors that would be important in demonstrating to their offspring what is safe in the world. ![]() Mothers will tend to transmit caution and information about threat (with overly anxious mothers transmitting more anxiety to their offspring), whereas fathers may be more likely to teach their offspring how to explore the environment and compete with others (and in so doing, reduce anxiety). So, what’s the role of the father in all this? This is far from clear, although Susan Bögels and colleagues from the University of Amsterdam have argued that the evolved basis of sex differences in parenting means that mothers and fathers will convey quite different aspects of anxiety to their offspring. This is because studies have often failed to find similar effects with fathers. You’ll have noticed that this blog post has very much focused on mothers as being the agents of the transmission of anxiety within families. Infants and toddlers as young as 10 months old have been shown to be influenced by their mother’s behavior, including responding with fear to fearful gestures and expressions, and-in a research article intriguingly titled “Mother knows best”-showing avoidance to toys to which their mother has reacted negatively. In fact, it’s not just older children who are affected by the anxiety cues transmitted by their parents. And this too is an effect that is found much more reliably with anxious mothers than with anxious fathers. For example, parents who tend to be socially isolated (who rarely go out except on special occasions), or express concern with other people’s opinions (by placing importance on how it would look to other people if, for example, their child didn’t do well at school), or show avoidance to socially relevant stimuli (by avoiding some social gatherings because of shyness) tend to have children who also show high levels of social anxiety during their development. This has been shown to be the case with the transmission of social anxiety between parents and offspring. Another direct way in which anxiety can be transmitted from parents to their children is through the modeling of avoidance-it’s likely to be the case that extremely avoidant parents model avoidance as a coping strategy when confronted with potential threats and challenges.
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