Adults who report having experienced cold, abusive, or controlling parenting during childhood tend to face greater difficulties in daily life—and these problems may be partly explained by their personality traits, according to new research published in Psychological Reports. The findings suggest that early family environments can shape how people function in adulthood, not just through trauma but through persistent patterns in how they think, act, and relate to others.
The researchers were interested in understanding how negative parenting experiences could have long-term consequences that extend into adulthood. Previous studies had shown that people who experience dysfunctional parenting—such as parents who are emotionally neglectful, abusive, or overly controlling—often report more problems with emotional regulation, lower self-esteem, and difficulty maintaining relationships.
But it was not yet clear what internal processes might link these early experiences to problems in adulthood. One possibility is that personality traits shaped by early experiences help explain why some people struggle more than others. The study aimed to explore that link in detail, focusing on traits associated with antisocial tendencies like psychopathy and sadism, while also accounting for broader personality traits like agreeableness and conscientiousness.
To conduct the study, researchers recruited 446 adult participants from across the United States using an online platform. Participants ranged in age from young adulthood to late middle age, with an average age of 46. The sample was evenly split between men and women, and the majority identified as White. Participants completed a series of self-report questionnaires that measured their current personality traits, past experiences of parenting during childhood, and how much difficulty they experienced in various areas of life, including social, emotional, and work functioning.
To assess negative parenting, the researchers asked participants to recall how their parents behaved toward them before the age of 16. They looked at three specific styles: indifference (such as being emotionally cold or unresponsive), abuse (which included verbal, physical, or sexual mistreatment), and overcontrol (which involved being excessively protective or intrusive). These styles were measured separately for mothers and fathers.
Participants also completed standard psychological assessments of sadistic and psychopathic traits. Sadism, in this context, refers to the tendency to enjoy causing others pain or discomfort, while psychopathy includes traits like impulsivity, emotional coldness, and disregard for rules or others’ well-being.
The researchers also measured agreeableness and conscientiousness, two of the five basic personality traits that have been widely studied in psychology. Finally, they used a validated scale to measure how much the participants struggled with daily functioning, including problems with family relationships, social life, work, and self-management.
The researchers then analyzed how the reported parenting styles were related to current life difficulties, and whether this relationship was explained by differences in personality traits. They found that people who reported more negative parenting—especially from their mothers—also tended to report higher levels of psychopathy, and that psychopathy in turn predicted greater difficulty functioning in daily life. However, this pattern was not seen for sadism. In other words, psychopathy appeared to serve as a bridge between negative parenting and later life problems, at least in a statistical sense.
But the story became more complicated when the researchers added agreeableness and conscientiousness to their analysis. Once these broader traits were taken into account, the link between dysfunctional parenting and functional impairment through psychopathy disappeared.
Instead, the relationship was better explained by low levels of conscientiousness. People who reported more cold, abusive, or controlling parenting—again, especially from mothers—also tended to score lower on conscientiousness, and those with lower conscientiousness reported more problems managing their daily lives.
This finding suggests that the more specific traits associated with psychopathy may not be the key factor in linking early family environments to adult struggles. Rather, general personality traits, particularly conscientiousness, might better capture how childhood experiences shape adult functioning.
Conscientiousness includes characteristics like impulse control, planning, organization, and reliability—skills that are important for managing work, relationships, and everyday responsibilities. Low conscientiousness has previously been linked to many forms of dysfunction, including substance abuse, risky behavior, and unemployment.
The researchers also found that these patterns were somewhat different for men and women. When they ran the same analyses separately by sex, the mediating role of psychopathy between dysfunctional parenting and life impairment held up for men but not for women. This is consistent with other research suggesting that men are more likely to respond to harsh early environments with externalizing behaviors like rule-breaking or emotional detachment, whereas women may react in different ways.
The authors interpreted this through the lens of life history theory, which proposes that people adapt their behavior and personality to the kinds of environments they experience growing up. In unstable or threatening settings, some individuals may adopt faster, more impulsive strategies as a way to survive, even if those strategies later interfere with social success or well-being.
The study also raised questions about whether mothers’ behaviors have a stronger long-term impact than fathers’. Although the data included assessments of both parents, the associations between dysfunctional parenting and adult outcomes were generally stronger for maternal behaviors. This could reflect the larger role mothers tend to play in child-rearing, or it could be due to biases in how people remember and report their early experiences. The researchers acknowledged that the literature is mixed on this point and called for more nuanced research that considers both parents together.
But the study has some limitations to keep in mind. It relied entirely on self-report measures, which are subject to memory distortions and social desirability bias. Participants were asked to recall parenting behaviors that occurred decades earlier, which may not always be accurate. The cross-sectional design also means the researchers cannot draw firm conclusions about cause and effect. While the findings are consistent with the idea that dysfunctional parenting contributes to later personality traits and functional difficulties, they do not prove it. Longitudinal studies that track individuals over time would be better suited to test these kinds of developmental pathways.
The study also focused on negative parenting and antisocial traits, leaving open the question of how positive parenting might foster strengths or resilience. And while the sample was diverse in age, it was not representative of clinical populations or people experiencing severe dysfunction. Future research might explore whether similar patterns hold in other groups, including those with diagnosed personality disorders or people undergoing treatment.
The study, “The Lasting Effects of Bad Parenting: Effects of Dysfunctional Parenting on Functional Impairment Through Antisocial Personality,” was authored by Charlotte Kinrade, William Hart, and Peter J. Castagna
