Parents’ Roles in Guiding Children’s Educational, Religious, and Other Trajectories

Abstract

Although socialization efforts by parents have long been studied, the specific influence techniques parents adopt in promoting positive developmental trajectories have gone largely neglected by researchers. To investigate parental influence in supporting children's development in different domains we sampled 15 developmental trajectories, ranging from education and religion to cooking and the environment. Two methods of parental influence were targeted: guidance and pressure. Mothers' and fathers' reported behaviors associated with promotion of two trajectories--educational and religious--were also assessed. We predicted that parental guidance in those two domains would have a greater association with their children's values than parental pressure. Three hundred undergraduates filled out an on-line survey. Domain-specific influence was found: parents reportedly provided most guidance in the educational and family trajectories and the least in the artistic and environmental trajectories. Mothers were reported to provide more guidance than fathers but there was no main effect for sex of student. Guidance and pressure were correlated with the frequency of particular parenting practices. In regression analyses, parental guidance, pressure, and practices were used as predictors of youth values. None of these variables predicted students' educational values. However, maternal guidance was a significant predictor of youth valuing religion. Implications are discussed.

Religiosity, Developmental Context, and Sexual Shame in Pornography Users: A Serial Mediation Model

“…Many studies show that the faith attitudes and behaviors of parents strongly predict those of their children (Bader & Desmond, 2006;Flor & Knapp, 2001;Heaven, Ciarrochi, & Leeson, 2010;Holden, Bayan, Baruah, & Holland, 2013;Martin, White, & Perlman, 2003;Petts, 2015), and this predictive relationship holds true for both the public and private components of faith (Leonard, Cook, Boyatzis, Kimball, & Flanagan, 2012). Parental religiosity is associated with healthy and unhealthy faith attitudes and practices (Holden et al, 2013;Power & McKinney, 2013). Due to the influence of childhood household religiosity, researchers are exploring the complex relationship between parent and child religiosity with the goal of understanding the factors that promote or inhibit transmission of faith attitudes and behaviors from parent to child (Power & McKinney, 2013).…”