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According to a new study if you have a tendency to become upset while driving, you’re more likely to be the kind of parent who explodes in anger at your kids’ sports matches.

Research by kinesiology Ph.D student Jay Goldstein of the University of Maryland School of Public Health found that ego defensiveness, one of the triggers that ignites road rage, also kicks off parental “sideline rage,” and that a parent with a control-oriented personality is more likely to react to that trigger by becoming angry and aggressive.

By surveying parents at youth soccer games in suburban Washington, D.C., Goldstein found that parents became angry when their ego got in the way. “When they perceived something that happened during the game to be personally directed at them or their child, they got angry.” says Goldstein. “That’s consistent with findings on road rage.”

And the parents who Goldstein defines as control-oriented were far more likely to take something personally and flare up at referees, opposing players, and even their own kids, than autonomy-oriented parents, who take greater responsibility for their own behavior. He said:

In general, control-oriented people are the kind who try to ‘keep up with the Joneses’,They have a harder time controlling their reactions. They more quickly become one of ‘those’ parents than the parents who are able to separate their ego from their kids and events on the field.

However, Goldstein says, even autonomy-oriented parents get angry, and when they do, ego defensiveness is the trigger.

While they’re more able to control it, once they react to the psychological trigger, the train has already left the station.

In 2004, Goldstein enlisted voluntary input from 340 parents attending their kids’ soccer games in the Washington suburbs. Before the game, parents filled out a questionnaire that would identify them as either control or autonomy oriented.

As soon as the game ended, parents answered another questionnaire that revolved around what, if anything, during the course of the game may have caused them to become angry, defined as “an emotional state that varies in intensity from mild irritation to intense fury and rage.”

More than half of the parents, 53 percent, reported getting angry, to some degree, during the game. The sources of the anger were most often the referee and their own children’s teams. Most parents reported getting only slightly angry for less than two minutes.

About 40 percent of the parents reported responding to their anger with actions that ranged from muttering to themselves to yelling and walking toward the field.

Credit: ScienceDaily