What is it about?
Parents often attempt to shape the attitudes of their offspring. Some of those attitudes include what are good life goals, good parenting, whether men and women are meaningfully different, and whether particular behaviors are moral (e.g., sex outside of marriage, abortion). Parents and adolescents often endorse similar attitudes in terms of these and other related social behaviors. Is this similarity (i.e., intergenerational continuity) caused by parental socialization, or something else? This study employs a novel analytic approach to address this question, and "splits" the agreement between parents and offspring into two pieces: the portion that is due to factors outside the family (e.g., culture, neighborhood, media), and the portion that is due to factors within the family (e.g., parent socialization). We find that although parents and adolescents share attitudes, typically it isn't because parents are socializing their adolescent offspring to think like them. Instead, it is because environments outside of the family are shaping both parents and adolescents to have similar attitudes.
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Why is it important?
This work is important because it shows (1) how strongly our attitudes during adolescence are shaped by environments outside our family, (2) conditions under which parent attitudes do appear to shape adolescent attitudes (e.g., when both parents share the same attitude), (3) the gendered nature of some intergenerational continuity, and (4) how to combine the statistical advantages of latent variable modeling into the framework of family fixed effect models.
Perspectives
A large part of parenting is co-creating the broader environment offspring experience. As children enter adolescence this becomes more of a give-and-take negotiation between parent and offspring. Even so, continued active input by the parents help to shape the adolescent's social world. That social world will then help define the adolescent's attitudes, which in turn will drive future behavior. Working together as coparents includes reconciling differences wherever possible. In half the attitudinal domains studied in this paper, adolescents do not appear to be influenced by their parents' attitudes unless the attitude in question is shared by both parents. In co-creating the attitudes of adolescent offspring, parents can use their vote to reinforce each other, or cancel each other out.
Thomas Schofield
University of California Riverside Foundation
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Intergenerational continuity in attitudes: A latent variable family fixed-effects approach., Journal of Family Psychology, December 2017, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/fam0000375.
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