A new study has found that moms who are in unhappy relationships spend more time talking to their infant sons than other parents. Psychologist Elian Fink and colleagues from the University of Cambridge studied both the behavior of ninety-three first-time, heterosexual parents and the extent to which they talked to their seven-month-old infant children. The team interviewed the parents about the quality of their romantic relationships, asking them to rate how satisfied they were. The researchers found that mothers who rated the quality of their relationship as “low” rather than “average” used around 30% more words when talking to their sons and started around 20% more conversations with them.The behavior may be due to a form of compensation, with the women focusing more on their sons to make up for the dissatisfaction with their partners. The effect only applied to sons. Researchers found that the daughters of unhappy relationships did not receive more attention from their moms. Meanwhile, no similar effect was found among fathers, who spend less time overall speaking with their children than the women in the study.
