Family, Parenting, and Happiness / Vitality
How family attitudes and childhood family experiences correlate with the SimilarMinds Vitality personality factor.
I reviewed experimental SimilarMinds items related to family and parenting and compared them with Vitality, the MOTIVES factor most closely associated with happiness, optimism, positive affect, and emotional stability.
The clearest pattern is that positive family identification and closeness tend to correlate positively with Vitality, while family conflict, oppressive expectations, and wanting distance from one's family tend to correlate negatively.
Strongest Positive Relationships
The largest positive correlations involve describing oneself as a family person, having been close to one's parents growing up, placing high importance on family, wanting a large family, and helping family members.
Strongest Negative Relationships
The strongest negative correlations involve viewing one's family as an enemy, feeling unable to form a solid childhood identity because of parental expectations, wanting to live far from one's birth family, and feeling that everything one did reflected on the family.
Family Items and Vitality Correlations
Correlations from -.150 through +.150 are shown with a white background. Only stronger positive and negative relationships are shaded.
| Correlation | Family / Parenting Item |
|---|---|
| +0.370 | I'm a family person. |
| +0.306 | I was very close to my parents growing up. |
| +0.282 | The most important thing to me is family. |
| +0.266 | I want to have a big family. |
| +0.263 | I help my family. |
| +0.245 | Having a family is the most important thing to me. |
| +0.234 | It's important for me to think about the future generations of my family. |
| +0.227 | I prefer to live near family especially if I have kids. |
| +0.213 | Family loyalty is important to me. |
| +0.178 | I was my parent's favorite. |
| +0.175 | I prefer to live near family. |
| +0.171 | My family is more important than anything or anyone else. |
| +0.170 | One or both my parents is my best friend. |
| +0.147 | It's very important for children to be obedient to their parents. |
| +0.116 | We have a lot of family traditions. |
| +0.104 | Family loyalty is more important than right and wrong. |
| +0.076 | I think it's cool when families (parents and kids) wear matching outfits. |
| +0.062 | I can be overly nice to family, loved ones. |
| +0.060 | My family is more important than other peoples' families. |
| +0.047 | My family is better off financially than it was five years ago. |
| -0.007 | I'm motivated not to disappoint my family. |
| -0.020 | Physically touching really makes me feel deeply connected to friends and family. |
| -0.033 | My parents were always challenging me to be better growing up. |
| -0.097 | A parent should try to give their child every advantage over other children. |
| -0.101 | Without my friends and family, I'm not sure who I would be. |
| -0.114 | Favoring friends and family in who you would share power with if you had a lot, is the best strategy. |
| -0.121 | I want my parents to be proud of me. |
| -0.132 | Corruption to feed one's family is understandable. |
| -0.192 | It's shameful to not have a perfect family. |
| -0.193 | If a parent has several children, I don't think they can have any long term effect on making them a certain way. |
| -0.208 | My parents were very strict with me. |
| -0.234 | My parents were often late picking me up growing up. |
| -0.240 | My life path has been more influenced by family responsibility than internal preferences. |
| -0.243 | Alcoholism/addiction run in my family. |
| -0.323 | I grew up with the weight of everything I did being a reflection on my family. |
| -0.340 | I want to live far away from my birth family. |
| -0.481 | My own family is an enemy. |
| -0.490 | I couldn't create a solid identity in childhood because of parental/external expectations/projections. |
What Stands Out
The positive side is not simply about obedience or traditional family structure. The strongest positive associations are more specifically about closeness, belonging, helping, wanting family connection, and treating family as personally important.
Several conventionally "family-oriented" attitudes have only modest relationships with Vitality. For example, emphasizing children's obedience, maintaining family traditions, or prioritizing family loyalty over right and wrong are positive but much weaker than simply feeling close to and supported by family.
Likewise, wanting one's parents to be proud, feeling motivated not to disappoint family, or defining one's identity heavily through family do not show the same positive pattern. In this dataset, some of those obligation- and expectation-focused items are neutral or negatively related to Vitality.
That distinction suggests that family connection and family pressure are not the same thing. Feeling loved, connected, and voluntarily invested in family appears very different from experiencing family as controlling, identity-defining, shaming, or burdensome.
How to Interpret These Results
These are correlations from self-report personality items. They do not establish that family closeness causes happiness, or that family conflict by itself causes lower Vitality. Personality, childhood environment, current relationships, mental health, socioeconomic conditions, and many other factors can influence both sides of the relationship.
Some items also describe childhood experiences while Vitality reflects current self-report. That makes the associations interesting, but they should be treated as descriptive patterns rather than proof of long-term causal effects from a particular parenting behavior.
The broad result is nevertheless fairly coherent: warm, voluntary family connection is associated with higher Vitality, while alienation, family hostility, and identity-suppressing family pressure are associated with lower Vitality in this SimilarMinds item set.