Impact of Birth Order and Parenting Style on Personality

Birth order refers to the order a child is born in a family. Parental Authority Style are the ways or methods that parents use to exercise their authority over their children. Common styles include authoritative, authoritarian and permissive. Personality is the set of traits, behaviours, attitude and patterns of thought processes that characterizes an individual and influence how they interact with the world around them. The aim of the study is to assess the impact of birth order (first born and last born) and Parental Authority styles on personality. A total of 100 young adults aged between 18-35 (male and female) were selected using convenient sampling method. Assessments were done by using NEO FFI by Costa and McCrae, 1992 and Parental Authority Questionnaire by Diana Baumrind, 1960. The analysis was done using descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation and linear regression. The results of this study concludes that individuals with neuroticism trait has negative correlation with authoritative (-.026) authoritarian (-.094) and permissive (-.089) parenting styles, extraversion trait with authoritative parenting style has no significant correlation (.081) whereas permissive parenting style has positive correlation (.263) and with authoritarian parenting style has non-significant but positive correlation (.113). Openness and Agreeableness trait of individuals with authoritative, authoritarian and permissive parenting styles has 0.01 level of correlation. Conscientiousness with authoritative has non-significant correlation (.010), with permissive parenting style has significant positive correlation (.240) and with authoritarian parenting style has moderate but non-significant correlation (.173). Authoritative and Authoritarian Parenting Style has weak relationship with the personality traits with variance of 4.6% and 3.7 respectively but permissive parenting style has a moderate relationship with the personality traits with variance of 12.1%.