PREMATURE MORTALITY AMONG CHILDREN LINKED WITH OVERPROTECTIVE PARENTS

According to a new study children of overprotective parents tend to live less. Men who had an overprotective father and little autonomy during childhood may run a 12% higher risk of dying before their eightieth birthday. In the case of women who had an overprotective father, the risk of dying before the age of 80 can increase by 22%. On the other hand, for women who were well cared for by their mothers during childhood, the risk may decrease by 14%.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The research also showed that men who lived with only one parent in childhood had a 179% higher risk of dying before turning 80. These are some of the findings of a study involving the analysis of data for 941 participants in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing who died between 2007 and 2018. The authors are researchers at the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil and University College London in the United Kingdom. The study was supported by FAPESP.

The participants included in the study sample were born in the 1950s and 1960s. “The results of our analysis refer to people who would now be elderly, and they wouldn’t necessarily be the same for later generations,” said Tiago Silva Alexandre, the last author of the article. Alexandre is a professor of gerontology at UFSCar.

The researchers analyzed the participants’ answers to questionnaires about many aspects of their lives, including family structure, housing, the head of the household’s occupation, the presence of infectious diseases, and relationships with parents in childhood and adolescence, especially care and protection. They looked for correlations among these items to estimate the impact of parental relationships on longevity.

Research on the psychological after-effects of child-parent relationships has shown that authoritarianism, permissiveness, and negligence can be negative for children’s development. “The middle way is best, avoiding both intrusiveness, which stops children from being autonomous, as well negligence or emotional distance. What we call care in the article is a matter of not neglecting but being present and taking care without overprotecting,” said Aline Fernanda de Souza Canelada, first author of the article.

The study is the first to investigate how the absence of a parent or deficient parental relationships can reduce longevity. “Children need parental care and support, but not intrusion, which deprives the child of autonomy. Research in psychology shows that this kind of relationship is also weak because the child is afraid of the parent, which leads to various problems, including unhealthy habits, with some studies showing an increased risk of alcohol and drug abuse, as well as mental health difficulties such as stress, which correlates closely with reduced longevity,” Canelada said.

“We know from studies in the area of psychology that all these phenomena relating to parental relationships affect behavior. There’s a theory that links this to stress. Neglected children may experience higher levels of stress later in life owing to the reverberations of this early neglect, and the probability of disease increases,” Alexandre said.

The researchers analyzed premature mortality independently from ill health and age. “It would be incorrect to attribute the higher risk of early death to a past event without considering the presence of diseases and problems in old age. We, therefore, controlled for these variables, and analyzed the correlations involving factors present in a subject’s childhood with premature mortality regardless of their health in old age,” he said.

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