Study Finds Parents Do Push Children to Fulfill Their Own Thwarted Dreams

A new study has found that one of the major reasons why parents often push their children to achieve something could be because they want their children to fulfill their own thwarted dreams. The research provides the first empirical evidence that parents sometimes want their child to fulfill their unfulfilled ambitions.

For example, parents who themselves faced rejection from a medical school, would like their children to become a doctor.

The experiments showed that pushy parents seem to share a common trait and they view their children as part of themselves.

The researchers asked 73 parents of children aged 8 to 15 in the Netherlands to complete a questionnaire to determine to what extent they view their kids as separate people.

Half of the parents were asked to write about ambitions they hadn't achieved, and the other half wrote about acquaintances' ambitions.

All the parents were then asked how strongly they agreed with statements such as, 'I hope my child will reach goals that I wasn't able to reach.'

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Those who viewed their children as most closely linked to themselves, were more likely to hope that their children fulfilled their own dreams.

Source-ANI