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Parents’ personality traits and children’s subjective well-being: A chain mediating model

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Abstract

In order to investigate effects of two core personality traits (extroversion and neuroticism) of parents on their children’s subjective well-being, as well as to investigate mediating roles of parents’ subjective well-being and their children’s personality traits. This study recruited 301 families, including both parents and children, and questionnaires were used to obtain the data. The results indicated that: (1) parents’ high level of extroversion personality trait predicted their children’s increase in subjective well-being, while parents’ higher scores on neuroticism predicted their children’s reduced subjective well-being. (2) Both parents’ subjective well-being and their children’s personality traits (extroversion and neuroticism) played a mediating roles in the association between the parents’ personality traits and their influence on their children’s subjective well-being. (3) both fathers’ and mothers’ subjective well-being mediated the relationship between their extroversion/neuroticism personality traits and children’s subjective well-being, and children’s extroversion/neuroticism personality traits played a partial mediation role between their fathers’ and mothers’ extroversion/neuroticism personality traits and their subjective well-being. By discussing and outlining the path from parents’ personality traits to the effect they have on their children’s subjective well-being, this study deepened the understanding of the relationship between personality traits and psychological well-being.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71874170), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (YD2110002004), the General Research Project of Zhejiang Provincial Department of Education (Y201941431) and the K.C. Wong Magna Fund at Ningbo University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department and Institute of Psychology, Ningbo University, No. 616 Fenghua Road, Jiangbei District, Ningbo, 315211, China

    Hang Fan, Dandan Li, Lan Jiao & Lin Zhang

  2. Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Hang Fan

  3. School of Management, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China

    Wei Zhou

  4. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, No. 96 Jinzhai Road, Hefei, 230022, Anhui, China

    Shen Liu

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  1. Hang Fan
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  2. Dandan Li
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  3. Wei Zhou
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  4. Lan Jiao
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  5. Shen Liu
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  6. Lin Zhang
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Contributions

LZ and SL conceived and designed the study. HF, DL, WZ and LJ performed the study and wrote the paper. LZ and SL reviewed and edited the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shen Liu or Lin Zhang.

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The study uses data from adults and children who participated in the research voluntarily. The whole data collection was done anonymously. All respondents had been informed that they could skip any question that made them feel uncomfortable or abandon the study at any time.

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Fan, H., Li, D., Zhou, W. et al. Parents’ personality traits and children’s subjective well-being: A chain mediating model. Curr Psychol 42, 16049–16060 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01078-4

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