The impact of parental religiosity on parenting goals and parenting style: a Dutch perspective

Abstract

Several studies, conducted mainly in the United States, have revealed that parental religiosity influences the way parents raise their children. Against this background, the current study explores if such an effect is also discernible in the Netherlands. Data were gathered as part of a longitudinal study, in which 356 Dutch parents answered questions about their religious beliefs and practices, their parenting goals and parenting style. Analyses revealed that there is only a weak, ambiguous relation between parental religiosity and a preference for autonomy as a desirable value to be instilled in children. Parental church attendance is negatively associated with a preference for autonomy, but parents who are actively involved in a religious community tend to value children’s autonomy more positively. Effects of other indices of parental religiosity were not found, nor was there an effect of parental religiosity on parenting style. As far as this sample is concerned, the conclusion is that religion is not an important factor when it comes to the way parents raise their children.

Keywords:

• parental religiosity
• child rearing
• autonomy
• conformity
• authoritative parenting

Notes

1. I used the dataset of the Study of Social and Cultural Trends in the Netherlands (SOCON) of 2000 and only made comparisons between respondents in the same age group as those in the sub‐sample (Eisinga et al. 2000). For the SOCON dataset this means that only respondents born between 1957 and 1962 (N = 162) were selected.

2. The original instrument for autonomy consists of seven items. One item (‘Learning to bear responsibility’) was removed because its inclusion in the scale seriously threatened the scale’s reliability, reducing Cronbach’s alpha to .37.

3. The original EVS instrument also contains items on God and on reincarnation. The item on God was omitted, because belief in God was assessed by means of a seperate question. The item on reincarnation was omitted, because it had a low, in some cases negative, correlation with the other items. Besides, on conceptual grounds one may wonder whether belief in reincarnation really is a traditional Christian belief (Halman 1991, 65).