Attitudes Towards Children: Distinguishing Affection and Stress

Despite the fundamental importance of children in adults’ lives, research has failed to systematically examine the psychological content of adult’s attitudes towards children. This manuscript describes four preliminary (N=1,073) and five main studies (N=2,227) addressing this gap, while also providing a new measure for assessing these attitudes: the Attitudes Towards Children (ATC) scales. After identifying beliefs, feelings, and behaviors that adults spontaneously associate with babies, toddlers, and primary/elementary school-age children, two factors emerged consistently: one factor capturing affection towards them and one capturing stress elicited by them. Focusing on attitude content towards school-age children, we found that affection is related to individual differences in positive affectivity, emotional approach tendencies, and a concern for others, while also predicting broad positivity in evaluations, motivations, and donation behavior specific to children. In contrast, we found that stress is related to individual differences in self-focused emotional instability, emotional avoidance, and concern about disruptions to a structured life. These attitude components also predict parents’ experiences in a challenging situation – home-parenting during Covid-19 lockdown – with affection explaining greater enjoyment, and stress explaining greater perceived difficulty. Furthermore, in a reverse-correlation image classification task, affection predicted mental visualization of children as more confident and less quiet, while stress predicted mental visualization of children as tougher and less innocent. Together, these findings offer fundamental new insights about social cognitive processes that impact children by revealing the importance of distinguishing between affection and stress in attitudes towards them.