Raising a Child to Live in Society – Personality Traits Parents Develop and Prevent from Developing in their Preschool Children

Abstract

Personal characteristics that parents want to shape in their children are called parental goals and can be divided into desired and undesired traits. Which of them are most and the least desirable by parents in context of developing child’s personality? Do parental goals change with the age of the child? The study was conducted on a sample of 319 parents of children aged 3, 4, 5 and 6 years old. Analyses were carried out using two data mining algorithms: (a) text mining algorithms, (b) support vector machine and (c) social network analysis, and (d) Aranowska's λ judge agreement coefficient. The results revealed that parents of preschool children care mainly about the development of competency traits, especially self-reliance. When it comes to undesirable traits, parents make sure that their children do not develop traits from the field of temperament - personality (especially aggressiveness) and traits from the area of lack of virtues (selfishness, laziness, lies). It is noticeable that when the child reaches the age of 4 the parental goals change. Based on the characteristics selected by parents, it can be correctly predicted how old the child is.