Parental Influence on Marriage
Conventional wisdom tells us that teens listen to peers and even other adults more readily than their parents. A 2022 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience1 found that, neurologically, it may be the case that brain development leads teens to “process their parents’ voices differently when they’re teenagers compared to their childhood years.” Experiencing this, parents commonly say, “They just won’t listen.”
However, sociological research compiled in Christian Smith’s book Handing Down the Faith reveals that when it comes to religiously motivated topics, this conventional wisdom is actually false.
Researchers like Smith attribute this conventional wisdom to “widespread cultural scripts” that “consistently say that the influence of parents over their children recedes starting with the onset of puberty, while the influence of peers, music, and social media take over.”
However, Smith observed that, “all research in the United States today shows clearly that parents are by far the most important factor influencing their children’s religion, not only as youth but also after they leave home.” Parents have a massive advantage because they have more time than others to influence their children.
Smith also observed that the youth rebellion of the 1960s based on early 20th century psychodynamic theory may have been genuine in its time, but “the reality today is far different and the stereotype of an adolescent generation gap is baseless.”
Announced last November, The Way: Youth to Young Adult Initiative addresses this challenge. As the committee that formed this initiative looked at recent research on this subject, several discoveries validated that parents can significantly increase the odds that youth will live as disciples into adulthood. First among them is teaching our children the language of faith by discussing it in daily life.
Parents have the most significant influence on their children despite what the dominant cultural voices of the past half century have loudly proclaimed. Smith observes that everyday and ordinary moments are the context for the highest impact on faith transmission, “the key mechanisms of socialization are the formation of ordinary life practices and identities, not programs, preaching, or formal rites of passage.”
How and how often parents discuss religion and living faith in daily life “is a powerful signal to children of religion’s personal importance,” Smith says. If parents regularly do this, “throughout the week, that effectively indicates to children that, in the mix of life’s many priorities and values, this stuff matters a lot.” The Way will provide planned discussion guides that can help parents get these conversations started. Learn more at kcsjcatholic.org/theway.
Parenting styles have a big impact on the effectiveness of faith conversations. They are commonly grouped into four categories: authoritarian, permissive, uninvolved, and authoritative.
Authoritative parenting is the ideal style to support influential conversations because these parents tend to have high standards paired with a high degree of connection (emotional/communicative). They are active in their children’s lives while providing “a lot of guidance and supervision, and adequately adjust rules and requirements to fit situations and their child’s personality,” says Smith.
Authoritarian and permissive parents are typically not able to have influential conversations with their children, because they are lacking in one or more of these aspects in which the authoritative parents typically excel. Uninvolved parents are usually deficient in all of them.
1: A Neurodevelopmental Shift in Reward Circuitry from Mother’s to Nonfamilial Voices in Adolescence; Abrams, Mistry, Baker, Padmanabhan and Menon; Journal of Neuroscience; May 18, 2022
This article first appeared in The Catholic Key. Author Dino Durando is the proud parent of a Chesterton Academy student.