Your children will abandon your beliefs unless...

A review of studies on radically enhancing the inheritance of values

I want my children to inherit my values. I imagine you feel the same. This is not an egoic attempt to project influence: principled people believe that their values are actually true and right, and they consider it their duty to help their children lead good lives which are ordered by this truth.

To this end, I have been exploring a set of studies which look at large samples of Catholic families (although the learnings need not be exclusive to Catholics, and can be generalized). These studies seek to identify patterns in the upbringing of children who grow up to live their childhood faith and patterns of children who grow up to abandon it.

I found some of the findings surprising - although, on reflection, one quickly sees their logic. In particular, they helped me resolve a seeming paradox which I had been struggling with: the competing ideas that ‘pressure on children makes them more likely to rebel’ and ‘faiths which make the strictest impositions on their followers have the greatest longevity’.

Meadham Kirchhoff AW14

Here, I will attempt to summarize the findings along with my commentary on why I believe the effective interventions prove to be so powerful.