Abstract
While forgiveness has long been a crucial concept in the churches' formulations for the establishment and the preservation of spiritual, social, and emotional health, consideration of forgiveness by psychology pales in comparison. Research is needed to identify the psychological factors in mothers and fathers which serve as antecedents of the nurturance which they provide their children. In this study, college students (N=111) were asked to assess the nurturance they had received from their mothers and their fathers using a Likert scale. Scale items included "I am an important person in my mother's eyes;""My mother expresses her warmth and affection for me;" and "My mother is generally cold and removed when I am with her." The parents of the student participants responded to a forced-choice forgiveness scale with items such as "I am a very forgiving person, ready and willing to forgive anyone who has wronged me." The results suggest a strong relationship between self-reported forgiveness by parents and the degree of parental nurturance reported by their adolescent children. Mothers and fathers who reported the least level of forgiveness were appraised as having rendered significantly less nurturance than other parents. (Author/ABL)