ABSTRACT
Given the general agreement that identification with one's parents plays a key role in personality development, it could considerably enhance our understanding of this process if we knew the rules governing the choice of the main parental identification figure, mother or father. The dominant rule to date has been the same-same-parent rule, that children identify with the parent of the same sex. It is a rule that derives from each of the three major theories of identification— psychoanalytic, modeling (Bandura, 1977) and cognitive-developmental (Kohlberg, 1966). The evidence for this rule, however, has been weak. A large number of investigators have failed to demonstrate that children resemble their same-sex parent any more than their opposite-sex parent (Hetherington, 1965; Hoffeditz, 1934; Lazowick, 1955; Mussen & Rutherford, 1963; Newcomb & Svehla, 1937; Peterson, 1936; Rosenberg & Sutton-Smith, 1968; Sward & Friedman, 1935-36; Troll, Neugarten & Kraines, 1969). Two recent studies report a larger number of significant correlations with same-sex parents than with opposite-sex, but the average correlations for the same-sex-parent samples rarely reach .30 (Grotevant, Scarr, & Weinberg, 1977; Munsinger & Rabin, 1978).
