Parental Influence on Sexuality - Research Paper Example

In most cases, the individuals are forced to disregard issues like homosexuality and attraction to same-sex due to stigmatization of such sexuality aspects by their societies (or parents) in their childhood.
Discussion
As a result, individuals who hold such socially unacceptable feelings will often tend to suppress them. In their research, Netta Weinstein and William S Ryan developed a hypothesis based on the idea that individuals who experienced low parental autonomy support had a higher discrepancy between implicit and explicit indicators of sexual orientation measured using reaction time (Netta et al, 2012). Furthermore, the research is based on the idea that such discrepancy may threaten an individual’s perception of his sexual orientation which may result in the individual developing defensive mechanisms.

For instance, if an individual was brought up in an environment in which his parents did not support autonomy and had a strong negative perception of homosexuality, then the individual will experience a strong discrepancy between implicit gay orientation and explicit gay orientation resulting in homophobia and negative perception of homosexuality without any solid reason for doing so (Grolnick, 2009). Based on the study, these ideas have been verified in the literature review since the research evaluates scientific papers that show similar results.

For instance, the research paper identifies that the relationship between parents and their children lays a foundation for a child’s behavior; specifically, autonomy-supportive parents enable children to grow up into individuals who determine their own fate or opinion on social issues including sexuality. In this regard, such individuals have personal opinions that are different from their parents and therefore have a low discrepancy on implicit and explicit perspectives on sexual orientation (Netta et al, 2012). Furthermore, the research also considers two previously done studies on sexuality in order to show the validity of their research.

The research supported the idea that an individual brought up by autonomy-supportive parents experiences less discrepancy between the implicit and explicit perception of sexual orientation (Grolnick, 2009). Moreover, this study also supported the idea that individuals with a strong discrepancy between implicit and explicit perceptions of sexual orientation had high levels of homophobia and antigay bias. Moreover, the research showed that there was no relation between an individual’s explicit and implicit sexual orientation if the father had low autonomy support.

Conclusion
Though the research supports the fact that an individual’s character is influenced by the degree of autonomy that the individual experienced in his childhood and that the sexual orientation is also influenced by the parent’s autonomy, the research fails to address other important factors like the role of government regulation as well as the legal perspective of individuals’ sexuality in other nation (Grolnick, 2009). Moreover, the research only addresses the US and German culture which forms a bias to other conservative cultures that stigmatize homosexuality. Additionally, the research also sources their information from college students, the majority of who no longer live with their parents. This information is subject to recall bias (Netta, 2012). Despite the above limitations, this research provides information that could be used to argue and understand variations of individuals’ perception of their sexual orientation and understand the behaviorism of children, especially when counseling their parents. Read More