352 
In the 1990s classic movie Home Alone, 
Kevin McCallister is a young boy grappling 
with finding his place as the youngest child 
in a large family. Kevin is accidentally for -
gotten and left home alone during Christmas 
vacation. At first, Kevin gleefully celebrates 
“making his family disappear,” but by the 
end of the movie, he tells Santa’s helper that 
instead of presents, all he wants is his family 
back. For the first two decades of life, the 
primary socializing agent for most children 
is their parents (Collins, Maccoby, Stein -
berg, Hetherington, & Bornstein, 2000). 
Researchers generally agree that parenting 
behaviors can be subsumed under three su -
perordinate dimensions: responsiveness  (i.e., 
emotional climate—  warmth, acceptance vs. 
hostility, rejection), demandingness  (i.e., 
structure—  regulation, monitoring, consis -
tent discipline), and autonomy granting  (i.e., 
support for individuation—  low psychologi -
cal control, encouragement of independence; 
Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Ryan, Deci, & 
Grolnick, 1995). These three parenting di -
mensions are typically positively correlated, 
although the associations often break down 
at the high ends of the distributions (e.g., 
parents who are responsive to the point of 
enmeshment are not often demanding to 
the point of being controlling and abusive). 
Genetically informed research (e.g., twin studies) has not yet estimated heritability 
for autonomy granting but typically finds 
moderate heritability for responsiveness and 
low heritability for demandingness (Oliver, 
Trzaskowski, & Plomin, 2014), which sug -
gests that variation in parenting is predomi -
nantly environmental, malleable, and due, 
in part, to the child’s personality (Ayoub et 
al., 2019). Thus, a better understanding of 
how parenting contributes to personality 
differences provides one potential avenue 
through which personality can be changed 
via intervention.
Measurement of Parenting
If we wanted to know whether Kevin’s 
mother is responsive, who would we ask? 
Parenting researchers use a wide range of 
measures, including self-  reports from the 
parent, informant reports from the partner/
coparent or child, ratings of behavior dur -
ing parent–  child interactions, and analogue 
laboratory tasks that mimic parenting situa -
tions. Each of these sources of information 
about parenting behavior has strengths and 
weaknesses, which means the best approach 
to the measurement of parenting is to collect 
more than one source of information. The 
most highly regarded single source of par -CHAPTER 16
Personality and  Parenting
Olivia E. Atherton  
Thomas  J. Schofield