Study Finds That Harsh Parenting Makes It Difficult For Kids To Regulate Stress

Bringing a child into this world is one of the most important decisions parents can make in their lives. It is also a lot of work to raise a kid in this modern age. With the newer generations now becoming parents, they are changing the way they reprimand or punish their kids. The term ‘gentle parenting’ is being tossed around a lot, and a recent study backed this method as well.

This study was conducted by Penn State and they found that kids who have been harshly parented may need more help from their parents over time to become independent, more evolved beings. The research was led by doctoral student Jianing Sun and Professor of Psychology Erika Lunkenheimer and published in Child Development.

They stated in a press statement that as children

grow from toddlers into preschoolers, they usually become more independent and need less outside help to calm down and manage their feelings. But when parents use harsh or aggressive parenting, like yelling or spanking, this natural change can be slowed or even reversed. Instead of needing less help over time, children may end up needing more, as their parents have to keep regulating their stress and emotions for them.

The study focused on how parents and children influence each other’s “stress systems” in the body, a process called “co-regulation”. When a parent is calm and steady, the child can learn to calm down too.

In a healthy situation, this balance slowly shifts as the child gets older: the child’s body and brain learn to handle stress more on their own, and the parent’s role becomes smaller. But the researchers found that for some children, this change does not happen.

The study looked at 129 pairs of mother and her kids at two stages – when the child was three years old and again one year later.

Before the visit, the mothers had to answer questions about their parenting, including how often they yelled or used physical punishment. During the visits, children tried to solve a hard puzzle, and mothers were allowed to guide them but not finish the puzzle for them. Both mother and child wore small monitors on their chests that measured their heart and breathing patterns, focusing on a marker called RSA (respiratory sinus arrhythmia), which shows how the body adjusts to stress.

“Young children are dependent on their parents’ responses not just to get their needs met, but also to learn appropriate rhythms for regulating their physical and emotional states,” said Lunkenheimer, who adde, “According to theory, parents’ sensitive and consistent responses foster safety and security, so the child’s nervous system can settle. Beyond parenting behaviour, our work suggests that a parent’s calmer, better-regulated physical state while parenting also plays a key role, laying the foundation for how children regulate stress in their body over time.”

What the researchers found was simple but powerful: when the mother’s nervous system stabilised, the child’s often followed soon after. This means that a calm mother can help calm her child very quickly. In mothers who were gentler and less harsh, this influence slowly decreased as the child grew from age three to four, suggesting the child was learning to self‑soothe.

But in mothers who used harsher parenting, the opposite happened: the mother’s influence on the child’s stress system stayed strong or even grew, and the child’s body stayed stressed for longer and had a harder time returning to a calm state. In other words, children who face harsh parenting do not learn to calm down as easily as their peers. Their bodies stay “revved up” longer, and they need more outside help to relax as they grow.

This pattern may help explain why children who are harshly treated are more likely to develop problems with stress and self‑control later in life.

“This study did not assess parenting behaviours or interventions, but it provides additional support of what I have found over my career in multiple studies: Children have the best outcomes if parents are sensitive and attuned to their child while also remaining flexible and able to regulate themselves,” Lunkenheimer said.

He added, “And that can be really hard — you might be attuned to your child, but then sometimes they throw a huge tantrum when you’re already feeling overwhelmed. Parenting is not always easy, but our work suggests that if you take a moment to regulate yourself — maybe even just pausing and taking a few deep breaths before responding to your child — there’s an important benefit in your child learning how to regulate themselves.”