After the Wall: Parental attitudes to child rearing in East and West Germany

Abstract

In the years following German reunification, East and West German parents (282 mothers and 207 fathers) were interviewed about attitudes to the rearing of their 7- to 13-year-old children and about their social networks. Path analyses show that East German parents engage in more protective and less permissive parenting, and that East German fathers raise their children in a more traditional and authoritarian manner than their West German counterparts. In part, these differences can be attributed to the strong family orientation of East German parents (many and intensive kinship relations, few friends). Further analyses show that corollaries of the social upheavals in East Germany, namely closer cohesion of the immediate family and a decrease in the social support provided by the extrafamilial environment, are associated with protective attitudes to parenting and hence with the tendency to limit children’s freedom of decision-making.