With the Republican and Democratic conventions upon us, and the U.S. presidential campaign in full swing, DailyInfographic.com dug into the archives for this amazing visualization of “right” and “left” that British data journalist David McCandless and information artist Stefanie Posavec put together in 2009 for his book The Visual Miscellaneum. The “Right” and “Left” refer to U.S., British and French politics, as you can see in the top strip of “Parties”.   

In 2009, McCandless made this observation in his explanation of the visual:

Researching this showed me that, despite my inevitable journalistic lean to the ‘left’, I am actually a bit more ‘right’ than I suspected.

The pieces that intrigued me most are the parenting styles, enlarged here.

Instilling fear in a child as a method of parenting, if interpreted negatively by a child, is considered one aspect of emotional abuse, which is one of the more damaging types of child maltreatment, according to the CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study). According to marriage and family therapist Felice Block on GoodTherapy.org: “Children who experience emotional abuse feel that they are responsible for the behavior of their parents and that if only they were more polite, better students or better children, than their parents would be more loving.”

But is there really a difference between left and right parenting styles? Is fear as an element of parenting exclusive to a particular political point of view?

That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve met quite a few people grew up in households filled with chronic intimidation and fear, and whose parents were registered Democrats.