Posts Tagged ‘relationships’

In “Mother- and Father-Reported Reactions to Children’s Negative Emotions: Relations to Young Children’s Emotional Understanding and Friendship Quality”, researchers led by Dr. Nancy L McElwain of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied over 50 pre-school children, firstly assessing their emotional maturity, and then observing play sessions with a friend. In a situation designed to produce stress and conflict it turned out that the optimum situation for the child was one very involved parent and one much less so.

Psychology today reports on ‘permaparenting’, the phenomenon of young adults coming back to the nest for indefinite amounts of time, or never leaving it at all. It paints a fairly bleak picture of young adults who are not mature enough to leave, and parents who are not mature enough to let them.

It’s official! Or at least one study, the Framingham Offspring Study ‘Marital status, marital strain, and risk of coronary heart disease or total mortality’, shows that women who bottled up their feelings during arguments with their spouse were four times as likely to die during the 10 year study period as those who told their husbands exactly how they felt.

According to an overview of thousands of psychology studies, men and women are psychologically very similar. So why are so many of us convinced that women are from Venus and men are from Mars?

The most important relationship we have in life is probably the first one, with our primary caretaker, usually, although not invariably, the mother. It is in this first relationship that we get our first taste of how to exchange love, care, pleasure, comfort, nourishment, in which we learn whether the world is a safe place that responds to our needs, or not.