How do I control my 4 year old bad behavior?
How
do we square this jarring contradiction? Two psychological scientists at the
University of Waterloo think they have the answer. They suspect that the belief
in parental happiness is a psychological defense — a fiction we imagine to make
all the hard stuff acceptable. In other words, we parents have collectively
created the myth of parental joy because otherwise we would have a hard time
justifying the huge investment that kids require. In
the jargon of the field, this is called “cognitive dissonance” — the
psychological mechanism we all use to justify our choices and beliefs and
preserve our self-esteem. Richard Eibach and Steven Mock decided to explore the
role that such self-justification plays in parental beliefs about their
irreversible choice to have and raise children.
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