ORIGINAL PAPER Intergenerational Transmission of Parenting Style and Personality: Direct Influence or Mediation?

Abstract In order to examine the relationships between parenting styles and personality traits over generations, a cross-sectional questionnaire study was conducted for fathers and mothers of school-age children of grades 5–9. The parenting styles measured by the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI) and the personality traits measured by the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) were corre-lated within and between the consecutive generations (the grandparents and the parents for the PBI and the parents and the children for the TCI). A series of structural equa-tion modeling showed that (1) while the parenting styles were transmitted directly from the grandparents to the parents, it was partly mediated by the fathers ’ Co-opera-tiveness (C) but not so for the mothers, (2) while the personality traits were transmitted directly from the parents to the children, it was only the fathers ’ parenting styles that mediated C, and (3) the parents ’ parenting styles had independent effects upon the children’s personality traits