Do Fathers Bond Better With Sons, RatherThan Daughters

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DO FATHERS BOND BETTER WITH SONS, RATHER THAN DAUGHTERS

AND

DO MOTHERS BOND BETTER WITH DAUGHTERS RATHER THAN SONS?

PSYCHOLOGY COURSEWORK

BY

JOANNA HOOK

11H

INTRODUCTION

The study that I will be conducting for my Psychology coursework will be on, parental bonding, specifically on mother/daughter and father/son relationships. My question is “Do fathers bond better with their sons rather than their daughters, and do mothers bond better with their daughters rather than sons?”

  John Bowlby was a psychoanalyst that worked from 1940 to 1080. He had a theory that attachment is innate in both infants and mothers. This means that it’s an inborn or natural occurrence. The formation of this attachment is crucial for the development of the infant. It does not matter about the sex of the child.

 The key features of his theory was on the observation of young animals, such as newly hatched ducklings, and noticed that they followed their mother closely, everywhere she went. He proposed that a human infant was also genetically programmed to form an attachment to its mother. He also proposed that between the ages of 6 months and three years, is the easiest time to form an attachment. Bowlby argued that if an attachment has not formed during this time, it would probably be too late. He also argued that the mother is biologically programmed to care for her child and that the baby’s main attachment is to the mother (or substitute mother). He proposed that the child’s father had no direct emotional importance to the child.

 Bowlby conducted his case study, by conduction interviews with a number of emotionally disturbed juveniles. He researched the people that he interviewed and looked at past school and medical records. (Bowlby)

METHOD

My study will consist of two different methods of research. Firstly I will conduct a survey of five students who live with both their parents, and also on five adults who see their parents regularly. This means I will need to write two different questionnaires, one for the students (Appendix A) and one for the adults. (Appendix B)

For ethical reasons, before I started I asked the parents of the students, for their permission, for their child to take part in the study and gave them a questionnaire for them to take a look at, after they read the questions, they were happy for me to ask their children the questions.

My second method is observation of a family; I have selected a family consisting of a husband, wife and three children. The ages of the children are, 10 (boy), 6 (boy) and 8months (girl). My aim is to see, which parent each child bonds with. I will observe their normal activities for one week between the hours of 6 and 8 pm. I will spend this set amount of time with the family each day and log down what happens, and the results of my experiments. When I have finished both methods of research, I will compare my results and come to a conclusion.

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For ethical reasons, I asked the parents permission to watch their family, and asked if they thought that the children should know that they were being observed for my study. They thought that the children would act more naturally if they were unaware of the study, and I agreed to tell them after the study was finished, and if they objected then I would not use their study and do it again with another family. (There were no objections at the end of this study,)  

Before collecting any information from my sources, I informed them that I ...

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