Anxious Americans, relaxed Swedes
Many areas of life in our modern society are becoming increasingly similar around the world. One of the few exceptions, however, is the way we raise our children. In the USA, parents tend to be obsessed with control: they want to be informed about every step of their child's life. Scandinavian parents, on the other hand, give their children a great deal of freedom. For them, it is important that their children develop imagination, independence and curiosity, and they generally interfere much less in their children's decisions.
Why do American and Scandinavian parents differ so much in terms of their parenting style? And why is excessive control currently so popular in countries like the USA?
Matthias Doepke, Fabrizio Zilibotti and I use an approach from economics to explain the different parenting styles in our research, which is based on behavioural psychology and sociological findings. Parents love their children and want them to be happy. But parents and children often disagree on how to achieve this.
How we perceive our environment determines how we bring up our children.
As parents, we want to prepare our children for life. Whether we remain relaxed like the Scandinavians or highly controlled like the Americans depends at least in part on our socio-economic environment: how we perceive our surroundings determines how we raise our children.
Let's take the example of inequality. In a society with strong social inequality, parents who are aware of the great importance of education fear that their children could stray from the «right path» and fail at school. So they react with strong control because they want to do everything in their power to prevent this.
Modern Scandinavian societies, on the other hand, have a low level of social inequality. A more relaxed parenting style therefore prevails there. If there is a «right way» at all, the agreement is associated with little risk and is no cause for concern for parents.
It should come as no surprise that societies in which income disparities have steadily increased over the past decades are now more inclined towards a so-called «intensive parenting style» than in the past. For example, American parents are much more involved in their children's lives and spend on average three times as much time on educational activities for their offspring as parents did in the mid-1970s.
Successful school dropouts
Other studies show similar results. According to the «Word Values Survey», 80 per cent of parents in the USA - a country with high social inequality - believe that work ethic and obedience are the most important values to teach their children. In Sweden, on the other hand, where inequality is particularly low, only 26 per cent of parents agree with this. On the contrary, three out of four Swedish parents believe that independence and imagination are the most important values to instil in children.
How should you best prepare your children for life and the hurdles they will have to overcome? It depends. Basically, an intensive parenting style is neither right nor wrong. But there are ways to avoid the excessive control that nips children's individual talents in the bud.
Parents in societies with little social injustice have a more relaxed parenting style.
This is how the «right path» agreement can open up huge opportunities. What do Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Brad Pitt and John Lennon have in common? They are or were all incredibly successful. And they all dropped out of school.
Political measures to change the economic and educational environment can relieve some of the pressure that families are currently feeling. Parents may then have the confidence to adopt a more relaxed parenting style and give their children enough freedom to realise their true interests. It is quite possible that the children will develop a greater zest for life as a result.
This text first appeared in English on BOLD - Blog on Learning and Development.
