Mother and son walking in the rain
Don’t we know it that boys despise being labeled a “Mama’s Boy?” Yet a research conducted in Pittsburgh shows that “boys who have had lots of conflict with their mothers were more likely to engage in delinquent behavior as teens, while boys who had a close relationship with their mothers were more likely to have a good relationship with their best friends when they became teens.”
This study was made on more than 250 mother-son pairs, from when the son was five years old up to his adolescence. Besides the mother-son relationship, it also looked at other aspects like temperament, behavior, relationship of mother and her husband or partner, and even parenting style.
Another study conducted by Dr Pasco Fearon, from the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, looked at 69 studies involving almost 6,000 children aged 12 and younger. This research from the University of Reading says a similar thing: children, especially boys, who have insecure attachments to their mothers in the early years have more behaviour problems later in childhood.
A mother and son relationship is a very unique one, writes suite101.com. Boys generally look up and to their fathers or a father-figure for counsel, advise and companionship. However, a mother’s guidance is warmth, patience and compassion, to name a few, that provide boys their natural abilities to interact with girls properly and correctly. This helps boys have better relationships with women when they grow up as men.
However, when boys and teens grow up to be adults or “men,” they are more likely to confess to a predilection for pornography than admit to a close relationship with their mother. Geographic culture and courtships dispell manlihood and marital bliss, that is, women may run a thousand miles away from a man who loves his mother just too much.
It’s a different story when a man becomes a father. His mother is now a grandmother and everything about their relationship is transformed. If there has been any separation, this is now reversed. The mother who lost his boy and teenager to becoming a man is now getting back her boy as the grandmother to his son or daughter.
Sources: suite101 | Science Daily | The Times UK
Photo by clintonbellizzi at Flickr.com
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