Love Attitudes: Similarities between Parents and between Parents and Children

Abstract

LOVE ATTITUDES SIMILARITIES BETWEEN PARENTS AND BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN* Jill Inman-Amos, Susan S. Hendrick, and Clyde Hendrick** As we attempt to understand how young adults form primary romantic attachments, we must consider a number of potential influences, ranging from parental socialization to peer group norms. The parent-child relationship usually is a child's initial primary social relationship, and may provide a model for later intimate relationships (e.g., Bowlby, 1969). How parents relate to each other may also affect the attitudes and values the child forms about relationships (e.g., Amato, 1986). In addition to the effects of their overt behavior, it may also be that the attitudes that parents hold about their own intimate relationships and about intimate relationships in general ultimately will influence their children's attitudes about relationships (e.g., Fisher, 1986). Young adults are also influenced heavily by their peers (for a review, see Gecas & Seff, 1990). Thus, a number of early socialization influences may affect the process of children's later formation of romantic attachments. This article is primarily concerned with how parents might affect one aspect of a child's romantic relationship, namely the child's attitudes toward love. This specific research issue exists within a broader context of attitude transmission and family relationships. Transmission of Attitudes Two perspectives informed the current research. The cohort perspective on attitudes (e.g., Bengston & Cutler, 1976) focuses on ways in which groups (identified by the various criteria of generational membership) differ with respect to specified attitudes or behaviors. Given this perspective, it might be expected that young adults would hold attitudes and values similar to those of their peers, and might be less likely to simply assume parental attitudes and values (e.g., Clebone & Taylor, 1992). A lineage perspective views childhood socialization as so intense that the attitudes formed in the family context are handed down from parents to child, persisting through adolescence and perhaps across the lifespan (Paikoff & Brooks-Gunn, 1991). As a result, children share parental perceptions of the world (Bengston & Black, 1973; Gecas & Seff, 1990). Parental attitude transmission may be influenced by a number of factors, including general family cohesiveness (Troll, Neugarten, & Kraines, 1969), attitude agreement between the parents (Jennings & Niemi, 1968), and parental supportiveness of the child (Sanders & Mullis, 1988). In contrast, some research indicates that the degree of emotional closeness between parents and their children may have little effect on how much parents influence their children (Acock, 1984; Kandel & Lesser, 1972; Smith, 1983). One key finding has been that attitude congruence between children and parents was highest for behaviors that were highly visible and salient over long periods of time (e.g., religious affiliation, political party affiliation), and lowest on abstract or diffuse attitudes and general value statements (e.g., Acock, 1984; Glass, Bengston, & Dunham, 1986; Smith, 1982). In other words, attitudes and values may need to have explicit referents in order for similarity between parents and children to develop. Consistent with this perspective, Fisher (1986, 1988) found that, among late adolescents, parent and child sexual attitudes were correlated in a high family communication group, but not in a low communication group. These findings suggest that attitude congruence between parents and children requires attitude visibility and salience. Some research has focused more specifically on how parents and young adult children may influence each other vis-a-vis the children's intimate relationships. For example, Leslie, Huston, and Johnson (1986) found that children may effectively block a parent's influence by not communicating about partners of whom they know their parents will disapprove (providing indirect evidence that parental attitudes are known and are indirectly shaping communication and behavior). …