My younger son and I have a long standing tradition of arguing
current psych issues from differing viewpoints. Last year, when
TIPS was heavy into _The Nurture Assumption_ debate, he was deciding
on a topic for his graduation project. After a few rounds on Harris
vs. Kagen, he thought it might be interesting to ask "students" who
had the most influence in different areas of their lives. It seemed
simple, doable, and relevant to his life (far more so than a research
paper on Freud, which his psych teacher suggested), so I encouraged
him to go for it.
Basically, when asked by anonymous questionnaire who had the most
influence on their attitudes and behaviors regarding 1) sex, 2) drugs,
3)alcohol, 4)academics (school), and 5) general morals and values,
students reported equal influence of parents and peers on sex, drugs,
and alcohol. When it came to academics and morals, parents had by far
the greatest influence (I don't have the paper here, but it was highly
sig. by chi-square analysis). The most interesting finding was the
differential influence of mothers vs. fathers. Mothers had more
influence than fathers in every category except academics. The
influence of media was almost nonexistent.
Moral of this story? Parents do have an influence on their kids'
attitudes and behaviors--maybe they just need to talk more about
the difficult stuff, like sex, drugs, and alcohol. Fathers may need to
get more involved in the conversation!
Yeah, it was small (n=50) and all the students were from a suburban
relatively affluent school district, but it gave me hope.
Pam
