The Roots of Attachment, Part I: How Personality Traits Influence Parenting Styles

Many people come to 16Personalities seeking insights about their romantic relationships, hoping to understand why they connect, communicate, or clash with their romantic partners in certain ways. While personality certainly influences these patterns, there’s another powerful force at work as well: attachment style.

As we discuss in our article “Attachment Theory and Personality Type: Exploring the Connections,” personality and attachment patterns often play off of each other. They develop quite differently, though not exactly independently. Your personality traits are mostly innate. Yes, there is some environmental influence, but you’re born with a core temperament that stays mostly stable throughout your life. Your attachment style, however, while certainly shaped by your personality, is heavily molded by your upbringing.

Simply put, how you love as an adult reflects how you were loved and cared for as a child. To truly understand your attachment style within your romantic relationships, you need to look at your childhood, particularly your relationship with your primary caregiver and how they raised you.

It’s this intersection between how you were parented and how you now approach your adult relationships that we are going to explore in this deep dive into the roots of attachment.

This article is the first in a series that seeks to bridge the connections between personality, parenting, and attachment. Understanding the interplay between these factors and your early life experiences offers valuable insights into your behavior. As you read through this series of articles, think of them as a guide for exploring the blueprint of your emotional foundation. The goal is to help you better understand yourself and your relationship patterns.

To kick off this series, we are going to ask you to go way back and direct your attention to the person or people who raised you. As we’ve just established, your caregiver’s parenting directly shaped your attachment patterns. But what you might not have realized is that your caregiver’s personality had a lot to do with their parenting style. So, we are going to start there – with an exploration of how different personality traits influence parenting styles.

Then, in Part II of this series, we’ll take a more focused look at how each parenting style, in turn, tends to shape childhood attachment patterns. By the end of the first two articles, you should have a good idea of the attachment style that you have, how and why you have it, and how it impacts your current romantic relationships. All of this will lead into Part III, where we’ll shift our focus to personal growth and how you might develop a more secure attachment style as an adult. As a bonus, we’ve also put together Part IV of this series – a special guide for parents and prospective parents who want to more effectively support the development of a secure attachment style for their own children.

Before we get started, it might be helpful to clarify that you have some leeway in how you define “primary caregiver,” as well as who you might think of as yours. If you had multiple caregivers, you might want to consider each one individually. Whoever they are, we suggest inviting them to take our free personality test. Knowing their personality type will make this article a lot more interesting and relevant to your personal experience.

Understanding Parenting Styles

Parenting styles are built on two key elements: responsiveness and demandingness. Think of these as the “warmth” and “structure” of parenting. These two dimensions are essentially measured on a scale. According to developmental experts, every parent falls somewhere between high or low responsiveness and high or low demandingness in the ways that they interact with their children.

Responsiveness is how parents tune in to their children’s emotional and physical needs. Highly responsive parents usually engage in the following behaviors:

Listening actively to their children
Showing empathy and providing emotional comfort
Considering their children’s needs and preferences in their decision-making
Responding quickly to their babies’ cries
Regularly engaging with their children through talking, singing, and eye contact
Praising and encouraging their children
Including their children in family discussions
Taking an interest in their children’s thoughts and feelings

Demandingness refers to the rules, expectations, and standards that parents set. Parents with high demandingness have the following tendencies:

Creating consistent routines starting in early infancy
Setting clear expectations and rules
Enforcing age-appropriate boundaries
Using consistent consequences
Teaching life skills
Encouraging their children to help with household tasks

These two elements combine to create four distinct parenting styles that most parenting experts recognize:

Authoritarian (low responsiveness, high demandingness): People with an authoritarian parenting style enforce strict rules and high expectations, often using punishment to ensure obedience. They prioritize control over their child’s independence.
Permissive (high responsiveness, low demandingness): Permissive parents are loving and nurturing but struggle with setting limits. They often give in to their children’s demands and may struggle to enforce boundaries.
Indifferent (low responsiveness, low demandingness): Parents with an indifferent style tend to be uninvolved or uninterested in their children’s lives, often struggling with personal issues that prevent them from meeting anything other than their children’s basic needs.
Authoritative (high responsiveness, high demandingness): Generally considered to be the healthiest approach, the authoritative parenting style balances clear expectations with warmth and communication. Authoritative parents encourage independence while maintaining reasonable limits, explaining consequences rather than simply punishing their children.

Did your caregiver have high or low responsiveness when you were growing up? What about demandingness? Which of the four parenting styles most closely matches how you were raised?

How Do Individual Personality Traits Influence Parenting?

So now we get to the fascinating part where we discuss how personality fits into all of this.

Though any given parent’s balance of responsiveness and demandingness reflects a variety of factors, certain parenting tendencies can often be linked to an individual’s personality traits.

It is important to mention, however, that the links between personality and parenting are not carved in stone. Personality traits can manifest differently for different people, as can levels of responsiveness and demandingness. These elements, of course, overlap and play off of one another – making it impossible to say that any given personality trait directly correlates to certain behaviors all of the time. We encourage you to keep this in mind as you read through each trait description below.

Introverted and Extraverted

While quieter in their approach, many Introverted parents are highly tuned in and responsive to their children. Their ability to engage in one-on-one interactions that are deep and meaningful creates special opportunities for connection, and their thoughtful responses and focused attention can foster strong bonds. This can result in high responsiveness. It’s also true, however, that Introverted parents may need time alone to recharge from constant demands on their attention. If this need is particularly strong, they may show lower responsiveness to their children.

The energetic nature of Extraverted personalities usually shines through in their parenting. These personality types tend to create vibrant, engaging environments for their children, who often benefit from rich social experiences and stimulating activities. The typical expressiveness of Extraverted parents lends itself to high responsiveness – they are more likely to be talkative, openly affectionate, and readily available for interaction. Lower responsiveness may result if they are not tuned into a child’s more subtle emotional cues, however.

Intuitive and Observant

Intuitive parents are naturals at recognizing and celebrating individuality, and this can be an advantage when it comes to nurturing their children’s potential. Their abstract thinking and creativity often translate into a parenting approach that emphasizes exploration and the development of unique talents. These parents tend to be attuned to subtle cues about their children’s emotional needs and interests, typically resulting in higher responsiveness. Their inclination toward considering possibilities rather than established norms can also lead to lower demandingness, as they may prefer to guide rather than direct their children’s growth.

Observant parents typically bring a practical, grounded approach to their parenting. Their attention to concrete details and real-world considerations often shapes how they respond to their children’s needs. When it comes to responsiveness, Observant parents are usually quick to address immediate physical needs and practical concerns. They also tend to emphasize the importance of developing competence in everyday tasks, which may manifest as higher demandingness in areas related to practical skills and routines.

Thinking and Feeling

Logic and rationality often characterize the approach of Thinking parents, who tend to emphasize problem-solving over sensitive validation when interacting with their children. This may show up as lower responsiveness, but doesn’t automatically mean that Thinking types don’t take action when their children need them. It’s just that without a certain level of emotional intelligence, these personalities’ responsiveness is more likely to be pragmatic in nature. Warmth and empathy may be more challenging for these types than meeting their children’s physical needs.

Feeling personality types have a much stronger tendency toward high emotional responsiveness. They are often skilled at reading their children’s emotional needs. This is because they instinctively understand and empathetically respond to both explicitly stated and subtly expressed feelings. Feeling parents may struggle, however, when it comes to knowingly disappointing their children. Prioritizing emotional considerations is often linked to lower demandingness, and enforcing rules and holding boundaries is something that parents with this personality trait may struggle with.

Judging and Prospecting

Judging types are often known for their sense of organization and appreciation of structure. This personality trait has a strong influence on their parenting style, often resulting in high demandingness. These personality types generally strive for a well-organized family life, often conveying consistent expectations for their children and establishing clear routines. They are usually motivated by creating a safe and stable environment for their children, but if they leave no room to flexibly respond to a child’s unique needs, they may show lower responsiveness.

In comparison, spontaneity and adaptability mark the parenting style of those with the Prospecting trait. Rather than enforcing strict rules, these parents are more likely to embrace flexibility and encourage exploration, creating a relaxed atmosphere where guidelines and boundaries evolve based on circumstances. Lower levels of demandingness are typical for Prospecting parents, who are more willing than other types to give in to their children or let consequences slide.

Assertive and Turbulent

Assertive personality types are generally able to balance the emotional considerations of their children with the pragmatic realities of raising them, resulting in higher levels of both demandingness and responsiveness. They are generally comfortable communicating their expectations, able to maintain more consistent boundaries, and more likely to be supportive as their children develop resilience and independence.

The thoughtful consideration that is typical of Turbulent personality types tends to result in a parenting style that is more adaptive – and potentially highly responsive – toward their children’s needs. They are more likely to second-guess their parenting decisions, however. Due to their heightened sensitivity, Turbulent parents may also demonstrate less demandingness with their children. They often struggle to hold boundaries or enforce household rules in the face of their child’s disappointment or resistance.

Now that you’ve read through these personality trait descriptions, which traits do you recognize in your caregiver? In your opinion, how did their personality traits influence their balance of responsiveness and demandingness? What parenting style do you think they raised you with?

Does Personality Type Determine Parenting Style?

Understanding how individual traits influence parenting naturally raises questions about which personality types gravitate toward specific parenting styles. Perhaps you are wondering whether ENFJ personalities (Protagonists), who have traits that tend to align with both high responsiveness and high demandingness, are destined to be perfectly authoritative parents. Or whether INTJ personalities (Architects) are destined to adopt an authoritarian approach. The answers aren’t so straightforward.

Remember, no single personality trait exerts its influence independently of the others, and each trait manifests on a spectrum. While people with the same personality type share general broad characteristics, there is a lot of individual variation in how any given trait manifests. And when it comes to linking parenting styles with personality type, it’s also important to consider the influence of the parent’s own upbringing and broader cultural practices.

With that disclaimer in mind, let’s look at some research. Our “Parenting Preferences” survey reveals fascinating links between the personality traits that we tend to associate with responsiveness and demandingness and how people say they practice parenting in real life.

For instance, let’s look at how different personality types respond to this question: “Is it okay for parents to sometimes give in to their children because they are tired of arguing with them?”

One of the first things that you’ll probably notice is that not a single personality type shows majority agreement with this question. The simple truth is, most people don’t admit to giving in to their children just because they are tired of arguing with them!

But let’s take a closer look at those people who think it’s occasionally okay to cave to a child’s demands. While you might have thought that the characteristically flexible Prospecting personalities would be the most likely to think it’s okay to bend the rules, if you look at the chart, you’ll notice that Feeling types are actually more likely to think this way.

Notice how ESFJ personalities (Consuls) show surprising flexibility relative to other personality types, despite their typically structured nature. Despite having traits that, on paper, tend toward higher demandingness, their typically high responsiveness and preference for maintaining familial harmony may nudge them toward a more permissive parenting style.

In the same survey, we also ask, “Would you feel bad for denying your child things that are pleasant but unhealthy?” This question only asks respondents how they would feel about maintaining a limit, but the responses may give us an idea of the correlation between certain personality traits and the potential emotional hurdles of high demandingness parenting.

On average, only a minority of respondents admit that they would feel bad for denying their child something that’s unhealthy for them. But if you take a look among those who agree, the impact of the Feeling trait can, once again, clearly be seen. Notice how Diplomats are more likely to admit that they would struggle with guilt when enforcing such rules. Due to the influence of the Intuitive trait, these personalities tend to be deeply attuned to their children’s emotions. This significantly affects their emotional experience of parenting and how they feel about maintaining limits with their children.

This survey data demonstrates an important truth: While personality traits influence parenting in somewhat predictable ways, it’s impossible to decisively peg any given personality type to a specific parenting style.

Thinking about your caregiver, which aspects of their personality might have made parenting easier or more challenging for them? How did that impact you in your childhood?

Personality, Parenting, and Attachment Styles: What’s Next?

Understanding the interplay between personality and parenting styles offers invaluable insights that can help you make sense of how you were parented and how your caregiver’s personality played a role in your early life experiences.

Perhaps you had a parent with the ISTP personality type (Virtuoso), whose natural inclination toward logic meant that they showed love by teaching practical skills but didn’t always provide the emotional support that you needed. Or maybe you were raised by someone with an ENFP personality type (Campaigner), whose high responsiveness and creative approach to parenting meant plenty of emotional validation but sometimes inconsistent boundaries. Regardless of who raised you, understanding how their personality-driven patterns impacted your upbringing can help you understand the roots of your attachment style and your current approach to relationships.

Which is exactly what we’re going to explore in Part II of this series. So stay tuned.