Parental agreement on child rearing during early childhood and the psychological characteristics of adolescents.

In previous research, an index of parental agreement regarding child-rearing orientations was found to relate to the quality of children's psychological functioning from 3 to 7 years of age. For this study, the parental agreement index, derived when their children were 3 years old, was related to a variety of psychological measures and personality descriptions obtained when the children were adolescents. Reliable differences were found in the patterning of relations for boys and girls wherein parental agreement during early childhood was associated with tested intelligence, aspects of moral judgment, and dimensions of personality derived from self-reports for boys but not for girls. For adolescent girls, early parental agreement was associated with the congruence of "self" and "ideal-self" descriptions (i.e., self-esteem). For both girls and boys, parental agreement was associated with personality descriptions provided by observers; however, it was only in the sample of girls that early parental agreement significantly correlated with Q sort criterion scores referencing ego-undercontrol and ego-resiliency. These findings suggest that early family socialization experiences are importantly but differently salient for boys and girls with respect both to psychological content and the developmental timing of effects. The data suggest that socialization researchers consider the likelihood that developmental paths to competence differ markedly for girls and boys.