The relationship between parenting styles and peace attitudes

Canegallo, V., Broccoli, E., Cavarra, M., Santoddì, E., & Fabio, R. A. (2020). The relationship between parenting styles and peace attitudes. Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, 12(4), 185-195.

Taking into account previous literature on the role that the parenting styles to which individuals are exposed to during childhood have in shaping prosocial behaviors and attitudes, this study aims to investigate the relationship between parenting styles of parents and peace attitudes.

The peace attitude and the parenting style questionnaires were completed by 358 adolescent and adult participants. Pearson correlation coefficients were extracted and a stepwise multiple regression analysis was performed.

The results indicate that individuals with authoritative parents tend to show stronger peace attitudes and open the way to further study what parental characteristics may be responsible for the development of peace attitudes in individuals.

Participants retrospectively assessed their parents’ style. Future research may recruit both the actual parents of participants to collect more accurate data on parenting practices or use observational methods.

This work seems to suggest that to achieve a more peaceful society, the ability of parents to raise their children by adopting an authoritative style should be taken into account and – if needed – enhanced. Understanding the developmental pathways that can influence individuals to consistently choose peace is important to promote a stable culture of peace across several levels of observation.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the relationship between parenting styles of parents and peace attitudes in their children.