The spread of political alienation from parents to adolescent children.

Abstract

The present study examines the interpersonal circumstances that facilitate the spread of political alienation between parents and adolescent children. A total of 571 German adolescents (314 girls, 257 boys) and their mothers and fathers each completed questionnaires describing their own political alienation at two time points, approximately 1 year apart. In addition, adolescents completed questionnaires describing their perceptions of warmth in relationships with parents. Adolescents were in the sixth (M = 12.24 years old), eighth (M = 13.48 years old), and 10th (M = 15.51 years old) grades at the outset. Dyadic analyses revealed that initial parent political alienation predicted subsequent increases in adolescent political alienation for youth who described relationships with parents as high in warmth but not for those describing relationships as low in warmth. Mothers and fathers did not differ in terms of the magnitude of their influence. Adolescents did not influence the political alienation of their parents.

Activating effects of elections: changes in young voters’ political engagement over the course of an election year

“…Of the many factors that shape young people's political development, experiences in proximal contexts, such as home, school, or the peer group, have gained particular attention (Neundorf and Smets, 2017). Research has shown that young people encounter politics at school (Miklikowska et al, 2019;Noack and Eckstein, 2023) and adopt political attitudes from parents (Miklikowska, 2016;Legget-James et al, 2023) or other family members (Eckstein et al, 2018). Yet, in line with contextual models of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), more distal macro-contexts such as societal events (e.g., wars, political upheavals, scandals) also play a role.…”