The Influence of Parents and Families

This chapter begins to explore how parents and families influence emerging adults’ beliefs about marriage. Parents are the primary focus. Two key roles parents play in their children’s lives in terms of future behavior and current orientations are socialization and the intergenerational transmission of values. For emerging adults with happily married parents, many of the marital paradoxes appeared to vanish. The authors discuss how having never-married or divorced parents affects marital beliefs. Observing conflict generally appears to diminish many emerging adults’ view of marriage regardless of the current marital status of their parents. The influence of siblings is also explored. Parents and other family influences appear to be one of the key foundations on which emerging adults have built their internal conceptualization of modern marriage.

Conceptualization · Developmental psychology · Marital relationship · Socialization · Family Dynamics and Relationships · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving · Psychology · Social Psychology