A new study finds parenting styles are a strong indicator for how people think about a wide range of social issues, from education to elder care
Parenting style — helicopter parenting (disciplinarian) versus free-range explorer (nurturing) — may be a key to the country's political future. A new study out of Carnegie Mellon University has found a person's parenting style tips their hand to the adoption of future government policies across a wide range of social issues, including education, elder care and medicine. The results are available in the June issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
"There's a new dimension of parenting philosophy that has emerged (in recent decades) — free-range versus helicopter parenting," said Danny Oppenheimer, professor of social and decision sciences in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and contributing author on the paper. "If the (helicopter parenting) trend continues, we can expect people to endorse greater intervention in personal liberty in most social institutions."
Oppenheimer based his study on previous work by George Philip Lakoff, who examined a "government as family" theory. This approach suggests that a person's belief on how government should function is strongly correlated to their personal belief on how families should function. In the United States, this concept translates into two approaches — conservatives lean toward the moral "strict father" model and liberals lean toward the "nurturing parent" model.
In this work, Oppenheimer and his colleague Christian Lindke focused on the concept of the helicopter parent, which has been defined as "a parent who takes an overprotective or excessive interest in the life of their child or children." Free-range parenting falls on the opposite extreme to this parenting style. The team conducted three studies to evaluate the role of parenting style on policy implications.
