Many parents use warmth to shape behavior at some point. A hug and extra praise after a good report card, a cooler tone after a tantrum or a poor result. It can seem harmless, even sensible, and it often works in the short term. Researchers who have studied this pattern closely, though, have found that when children come to feel that their parents’ affection depends on how they perform or behave, the compliance it buys tends to come with emotional costs that show up in adolescence and young adulthood.
Psychologists call this parental conditional regard. Over the past two decades, a group of researchers in Israel and the United States, followed more recently by an Australian review of the field, have tracked what it is linked to. The picture they describe is consistent: children often do what is asked, but many also carry shame, resentment and a sense of worth that rises and falls with their latest success or failure.
What conditional regard looks like
The researchers separate two forms. In conditional positive regard, parents give noticeably more affection and attention when a child meets their expectations. In conditional negative regard, parents withdraw affection when a child falls short, becoming colder or more distant until the child does better.
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Both are different from ordinary praise or ordinary disappointment. The question is not whether parents notice a good result or feel let down by a bad one, but whether the child comes to believe that being loved depends on it. Most of the studies measure exactly that: how young people themselves perceive their parents’ affection.
What young adults reported
In a 2004 paper in the Journal of Personality, Assor, Roth and Deci asked 110 university students how their mothers and fathers had responded to them in four areas: controlling their emotions, being kind to others, schoolwork and sport. According to the published study, students who perceived more conditional regard were more likely to report acting out of internal pressure, a sense that they had to behave a certain way.
That pressure did seem to produce the behavior parents wanted. But it came with a cost. Students who felt their parents’ regard was conditional also reported that the satisfaction they felt after succeeding was short-lived, that they felt shame and guilt after failing, and that their self-esteem fluctuated more. They also reported more resentment toward their parents, a link the researchers found was largely explained by the students feeling disapproved of.
The authors summed up the trade-off directly: the positive behavioral effects, they wrote, “are attained at the significant expense of negative emotional experiences.”
Both versions carry costs in teenagers
A follow-up study published in 2009 in Developmental Psychology looked at the two forms separately. Roth and colleagues surveyed two groups of ninth graders in Israel, 169 and 156 students, with an average age of about 14 and a half, about their parents’ approach to their emotions and their schoolwork.
According to the paper, teenagers who reported conditional positive regard tended to feel an internal compulsion to meet expectations. That, in turn, was linked to suppressing negative emotions rather than dealing with them, and to schoolwork driven mainly by grades rather than interest.
Conditional negative regard followed a different path. Teenagers who felt their parents withdrew affection when they fell short reported more resentment toward their parents. That resentment was linked to difficulty regulating negative emotions and to disengaging from schoolwork.
The researchers also measured a third approach, which they called autonomy support, centered on understanding the child’s perspective and giving them a sense of choice. Teenagers who reported this kind of parenting were more likely to say they felt a sense of choice, which was linked to handling negative emotions more flexibly and to learning driven by interest. The authors concluded that even the gentler-seeming positive version had costs compared with autonomy support.
What dozens of samples show
A single research group’s findings can only go so far. In 2022, Jolene Haines and Nicola Schutte of the University of New England in Armidale pooled results from 31 samples in a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Adolescence.
According to the university’s summary of the paper, greater parental conditional regard was associated with more acting out of internal pressure, self-esteem that depended more on performance, more depressive symptoms and a weaker sense of connection to others. The associations were modest to moderate in size, which suggests conditional regard is one influence among many on how young people fare.
The review also found that the two forms differed. Giving extra affection for success was more strongly linked to acting from internal pressure, while withdrawing affection for failure was more strongly linked to depressive symptoms.
A pattern that can pass down
The 2004 study included a second part with 124 mothers and their university-aged daughters. Mothers who said their own parents had made affection depend on academic success were more likely to be described by their daughters as doing the same thing. They also endorsed less autonomy-supportive approaches to parenting.
The authors suggested that “these negative consequences may be passed from generation to generation.” That is not a verdict on any individual family, but it does suggest the habit can be absorbed in a parent’s own childhood, often without anyone deciding to pass it on.
What the research cannot say
These studies have clear limits. Most rely on young people’s own reports of how their parents behaved, and many are snapshots taken at one point in time, so they cannot show that conditional regard causes the problems linked to it. A child who is already anxious or struggling may also draw different responses from parents. Several of the key studies were carried out in Israel, and even the meta-analysis can only combine the studies that exist.
Still, the findings are consistent enough to offer a useful question for any parent. Not whether to praise or set expectations, but whether a child might be learning that love itself is the reward. On this evidence, children who feel accepted whatever their latest result are less likely to carry that shame and resentment with them, and the autonomy-supportive approach was linked to healthier ways of learning and of handling difficult emotions.
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