Attitudes toward children: Distinguishing affection and stress.

Background: Adults' views and behaviors toward children can vary from being supportive to shockingly abusive, and there are significant unanswered questions about the psychological factors underpinning this variability. Objective: The present research examined the content of adults' attitudes toward children to address these questions. Method: Ten studies (N = 4702) identified the factor structure of adults' descriptions of babies, toddlers, and school‐age children and examined how the resulting factors related to a range of external variables. Results: Two factors emerged—affection toward children and stress elicited by them—and this factor structure was invariant across the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa. Affection uniquely captures emotional approach tendencies, concern for others, and broad positivity in evaluations, experiences, motivations, and donation behavior. Stress relates to emotional instability, emotional avoidance, and concern about disruptions to a self‐oriented, structured life. The factors also predict distinct experiences in a challenging situation—home‐parenting during COVID‐19 lockdown—with affection explaining greater enjoyment and stress explaining greater perceived difficulty. Affection further predicts mentally visualizing children as pleasant and confident, whereas stress predicts mentally visualizing children as less innocent. Conclusions: These findings offer fundamental new insights about social cognitive processes in adults that impact adult–child relationships and children's well‐being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Personality is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)