Parental Support during Childhood Predicts Life History-Related Personality Variation and Social Status in Young Adults

Abstract

Adaptationist theories of development posit the existence of facultative mechanisms designed to calibrate individual differences in life history strategy to cues available in childhood. Such theories have led to the discovery of links between parenting-related cues and multiple life history phenotypes in offspring (e.g., reproductive timing), but less is known about the influences of parental behavior on the development of stable personality traits. This article reports a preliminary test of the hypothesis that life history-related personality variation is developmentally calibrated in response to the level of parental support received during childhood. Consistent with this, in a sample of young adults (N = 321), (i) subjects’ reports of their parents’ income positively predicted the level of parental support they recall having received during childhood; (ii) these measures of parental income and parental support in childhood positively predicted subjects’ standing on the general factor of personality (GFP), long-term mating orientation, and prestige-based social status; and (iii) path analyses fit a model of the following form: parental income → parental support in childhood → GFP → prestige-based status. Moreover, these effects held when controlling for perceptions of current social support, which implies that associations of parental support in childhood with outcomes in adulthood did not reflect current perceptions or global self-evaluative biases. These findings, though preliminary, are consonant with recent theories positing that the GFP and prestige-based status reflect individual differences along a fast-slow life history continuum, and suggest that life history-related personality variation may be developmentally calibrated to parental support during childhood.