Science Confirms The Obvious: Strict Parents Raise Conservative Kids

Thursday, October 25, 2012 - 09:30 in Psychology & Sociology

Parenting Scientists can predict a child's future ideology from his temperament at just 54 months. Wikimedia CommonsAre you a bleeding-heart liberal? A rigid right-winger? Blame your parents! What makes a conservative? What makes a liberal? New research suggests that political socialization begins with parenting. Mothers and fathers who adopt an authoritarian parenting style (as opposed to an egalitarian style) tend to raise children who endorse conservative ideologies as adults. But it isn't just as simple as nurture over nature. Children with fearful dispositions are more likely to grow up with conservative values, too. Researchers at University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana confirmed these theories in an important, if not exactly earth-shattering, study published in Psychological Science recently. Psychological scientist Richard Fraley and his colleagues looked at early childhood and youth development data from the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). In the longitudinal study, parents of 1-month-old children...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net