This research report provided insight into the complexity of family interactions around the negative behaviours of both parents and children.
Fairness is an easily recognised property of everyday interactions among family members. All parents will have heard their children complain that something is “just not fair!” Children are clearly sensitive to experiences of unfairness and react to them with negative emotions such as anger and sadness. It is possible – though not yet well-established – that repeated experiences of unfairness, particularly unfair punishment and unfair lack of deserved reward, may make children hostile and less likely to forgive.
There are contextual and emotional factors that will influence the tendency to forgive, the most important of which appear to be the principle of give-and-take (the reciprocity between parent and child), as well as the intensity of the feelings of sadness and anger that are induced by unfair experiences. For professionals working with family issues and encouraging positive parenting strategies, the findings of this study offered insights into an important but little studied aspect of everyday family experiences.
Primary schools from a variety of socio-economic regions in the central North Island of New Zealand agreed to be involved in supporting this research, provide time and space and circulate an invitation to families to participate. The participants selected for the study were 82 children in Year 4 (9-year-olds) and Year 6 (11-year-olds) of primary school, whose parents had consented to their involvement in the research. In addition, 53 of the parents of these children agreed to participate as well.
The study found children were more willing to forgive a parent than a friend and provided many explanations of why this was so, typically around themes that parents (mothers in this case) did many nice things for children and, therefore, deserved forgiveness.