Parental values in the UK

Abstract

This article investigates the extent to which parental values differ between social groups in the UK at the start of the twenty‐first century. The study of parental values is an important area of sociological enquiry that can inform scholarship from across the social sciences concerned with educational inequality and cultural variability in family life. We draw on data from the Millennium Cohort Study to show how parent’s social class, religion, religiosity, race and ethnicity, and education are related to the qualities they would like their children to have. Our rank‐ordered regression models show that parents in service class occupations place significantly more importance on ‘thinking for self’ than ‘obey parents’ compared to those in routine manual occupations. We also show that although class matters, the relationship between education and parental values is particularly strong. Parenting values also differ by parental racial and ethnic background and by levels of religiosity.

Class and Conformity: Thirty Years of Adult Child‐rearing Values in the U.S

“…Our results strongly support Kohn’s main thesis that occupational differences, and opportunities for self‐direction on the job, exert a salutary influence on values for self‐direction versus conformity . Although our results endorse Kohn’s main thesis, we have arrived at this conclusion through a different—and some would argue superior (see Baker and Barg 2019)—approach. Using a set of micro‐classes defined by Weeden and Grusky’s occupational categories, we employed effect proportional scaling to maximize the relationship of the occupational categories to child‐rearing values.…”

“…Still, it can be shown that some of the educational differences (roughly one‐fourth) are mediated by occupation, so it can clearly be said that occupational class is an important factor in the understanding of child‐rearing values. These findings regarding the relative impacts of education and occupation are reinforced by recent cross‐national findings for the UK (Barker and Barg 2019). Within this framework we also examined whether there exists a strengthening of the relationship between religion and child‐rearing values over time, explicitly testing the hypothesis advanced by Starks and Robinson (2005) that the relationships between religious conservatism and child‐rearing orientations are growing stronger over time.…”

“…We cited the importance of Kohn’s work (e.g.,1964, 1977) on this topic, noting that it reinforced one of the time‐worn arguments in sociology—beginning at least with the early 20 th century ethnographic work of Robert and Helen Lynd (1929) in their classic Middletown studies (see Alwin 2001 for a review). These socioeconomic patterns have been observed both in the United States (Alwin and Jackson 1982b; and Kohn 1977), Japan (Kohn et al 1990), Poland (Kohn and Slomcynski 1990; Koralewicz‐Zebik 1982), the Ukraine (Kohn and others 1997), and the United Kingdom (Baker and Barg 2019). In addition to the importance of socioeconomic factors for shaping child‐rearing values, a substantial literature has developed on the topic of the relation of religious factors to parental orientations to children.…”

“…This approach to mapping class is constructed at the level of detailed Census occupational categories and is designed to more accurately capture the relationships between class and life conditions, in comparison to conventional big‐class schemes (Weeden and Grusky 2005). The approach has been strongly advocated in the area of child‐rearing studies (see, e.g., Baker and Barg 2019), but to date it has not to our knowledge been implemented. Using the best available quantitative data available for the U.S., we hypothesize that this approach will provide a more sensitive measure of occupations for purposes of predicting patterns of child‐rearing values.…”

The Popular Basis of the State’s Monopoly on Legitimate Violence: How American Voters Use Political Values to (De)Legitimate Gun Rights

“…These findings also contribute to work that uses the sociology of culture to understand gun culture (Carlson 2015; Mencken and Froese 2019) and build on the reemergent values literature in sociology (Baker and Barg 2019; Hitlin and Vaisey 2013; Longest, Hitlin, and Vaisey 2013; Miles 2015; Prasad et al 2009; Silver and Silver 2019; Vaisey and Miles 2014; Wuthnow, 2018) by bridging political sociology (Lipset 1963a, 1963b, 1989), the sociology of culture (Miles 2015; Vaisey and Miles 2014), and moral psychology (Haidt 2012). This article then constitutes a link between qualitative and cognitive approaches to values (Wuthnow 2008, 2018).…”