Abstract
American adolescents are leaving shared family religions at record levels. This trend threatens to divide families because when parents and children experience religious differences, their relational satisfaction tends to decrease, conflict increases, and family connection may weaken. Based on the theory of intergenerational solidarity theory, we explored how dynamic changes in religious congruence (consensual solidarity) between parent and adolescent might lead to decreased social connection (affectual solidarity). We hypothesize that adolescent empathy and parenting style might buffer the negative effects of religious incongruence on adolescent-parent connection. The sample featured 500 families drawn from Waves 3-5 of the nationally-representative Flourishing Families data set. We operationalized religious incongruence between parents and children as independent variables, creating three absolute value religious incongruence variables for prayer, religious importance, and worship service attendance. We ran three models of regressions for the three religious incongruence variables of prayer, religious importance, and worship service attendance. As expected, empathy and authoritative parenting style did increase adolescent connection despite religious incongruence. However, we identified several interactions between religious incongruence variables and our moderators. Differing levels of prayer interacted with adolescent empathy to buffer the effects of religious discord. In contrast, authoritarian or coercive parenting styles interacted at Wave 5 with both religious importance and worship service attendance incongruence to decrease connection. The present study is among the first to study the role of adolescent empathy in buffering the effects of decreased adolescent religiosity on family connection.
Presenters
Emily TaylorStudent, Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology, Brigham Young University, Utah, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Religion in the Public Sphere: From the Ancient Years to the Post-Modern Era
KEYWORDS
Religious incongruence, Empathy, Religious decline, Parenting style, Family cohesion
