Being rejected by your father can do greater, long-lasting emotional damage than being rejected by your mother, research finds.
While rejection by either parent is traumatising for children, fathers often have higher prestige and/or power.
Therefore, children can take their father's rejection harder.
Professor Ronald Rohner, co-author of the study, said:
"In our half-century of international research, we've not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent effect on personality and personality development as does the experience of rejection, especially by parents in childhood.Rejection by either parent, or both, has a huge effect on children's personality.
Children and adults everywhere - regardless of differences in race, culture, and gender - tend to respond in exactly the same way when they perceived themselves to be rejected by their caregivers and other attachment figures."
They tend to become more anxious and insecure.
They may also become more hostile and aggressive towards others.
The pain of rejection often lingers into adulthood, preventing people making strong, trusting relationships with other adults.
The emotional pain can be considerable.
The same parts of the brain are activated for emotional pain as for physical pain, other research has found.
Professor Rohner said:
"Unlike physical pain, however, people can psychologically re-live the emotional pain of rejection over and over for years."The results come from a review of over 500 studies.
The studies help to emphasise how inaccurate it is to simply 'blame the mother' for children's behaviour problems.
Professor Rohner said:
"The great emphasis on mothers and mothering in America has led to an inappropriate tendency to blame mothers for children's behavior problems and maladjustment when, in fact, fathers are often more implicated than mothers in the development of problems such as these."The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review (Khaleque & Rohner, 2012).
A father's involvement with his children, especially his young children, when it matters most, is powerfully contingent on the mother's attitude toward, and expectations of, support from him. The National Survey of Families and Households found that mothers' characteristics outweighed fathers' characteristics with regard to predicting father involvement with their children! Responsible mothering, by definition, means support of the father-child bond." Fatherneed p151 Dr Kyle Pruett
The nurturing by fathers has a tremendous impact on the development of children. Dr Pruett documents it in his decade-long tracking. Mothers cannot duplicate the effect, but they can either facilitate or obstruct the father's access and influence. Wherever there is an absence fatherly influence, there is an insecure mother with male trust issues. If she didn't have a good relation with her father, chances are she won't know how to facilitate the children's father doing for them what she never got.
And this condition is by design:
“There is no way of influencing men so powerfully as by means of the women. These should therefore be our chief study; we should insinuate ourselves into their good opinion, give them hints of emancipation from the tyranny of public opinion, and of standing up for themselves; it will be an immense relief to their enslaved minds to be freed from any one bond of restraint, and it will fire them the more, and cause them to work for us with zeal, without knowing that they do so; for they will only be indulging their own desire of personal admiration.” Discourse to the Illuminati Dirigentes; Proofs of a Conspiracy, p111, 1798