Does Parental Conflict Resolution Mode Affect Youth Gender & Racial Attitudes?

• In Event: Gendered Policy in the Home and the State

Abstract

Our study seeks to make a novel theoretical and empirical contribution to the study of political socialization and its impact on tolerance of otherness in established democracies. While prior studies have examined the role of direct transmission of attitudes (Jennings, Stoker, Bowers 2009), parenting styles (Bougher 2017; Wuttke 2019), and gender traditionalism in chore distribution (Healey and Malhotra 2013) on youth political attitudes and behavior, no study, to our knowledge, has attempted to explore the effect of patterns of parental conflict resolution on childrens’ tolerance of otherness. Our proposed study seeks to close this gap.

We argue that families are the training grounds for deliberative democracy and they do more than merely transmit political attitudes and beliefs. How parents (two equal but different significant others) choose to deal with their disagreements - via deliberation, respectful cooperation, and compromise or via aggression and domination – affects the formation of the normative foundation of liberal democracy - tolerance of otherness. It is precisely on this dimension that countries (from the U.S., to Hungary, to India) backslide. Right-wing populist politicians like Trump and Orban activate and mobilize precisely these attitudes to carry them into office (Vescio and Schermerhorn 2021) to begin dismantling the normative and institutional pillars of liberal democracies.

We use the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its Child and Young Adult supplement to test this causal mechanism behind intolerance of otherness. These surveys provide unique information on childhood experiences and allow tracing the influence of these experiences on racist and gender traditional youth attitudes. Most important, there is information on how parents dealt with conflict over time as well as information on parental gender and racial attitudes. The longitudinal nature of these data also allows controlling for contextual and individual-level factors, thus permitting one to isolate the causal effect of parental mode of conflict resolution on tolerance attitudes.

We hypothesize that cooperative style of parental conflict resolution is associated with a significant reduction in racist and gender traditional attitudes. We employ a multilevel random effects model to test this hypothesis. Our study has implications for rethinking the type and level of policy interventions required to combat intolerance of otherness.

Authors

• Vera Beloshitzkaya, FIU Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy

• Kathleen P. Reilly