The role religion plays in parenting is a commonly debated issue. Some parents argue that religion can be used as a tool to teach children compassion and respect. Others argue that children raised in religious households will have narrowed worldviews and weakened abilities for critical thinking. Does religion play a role in shaping the development and behavior of children?
A study published in Religions, an online journal, attempts to address how growing up in a religious household affects children’s development. The authors of the study claim that growing up in a religious home has both beneficial and detrimental effects on children’s development. According to the study, religiosity in the home improves children’s psychological and social development, but can be harmful to their performance on standardized educational testing.
To conduct the study, the psychologists took data from when children were in kindergarten (to check the status of the religiosity of their household) and again in third grade to examine how religion impacted their behavior and development. The study was longitudinal, which is good for a long-term experiment testing for a correlation between different variables. The sample used in the study came from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study- Kindergarten Cohort. The original sample included 21,260 children, and the authors claim that their sample is nationally representative. However, to remove a confounding variable, the scientists only included children in the study whose parents were married at the initial stage of data collection, when the children were in kindergarten. Because of this control, the sample size was reduced to 10,720 kids. Although this sample is smaller than the initial twenty thousand, it is still very large, which is a sign of a well-designed study. The authors don’t provide enough information about the sampling techniques to determine whether it is representative, which introduces some uncertainty into their results.
This table summarizes the observed results of the study. It shows whether each reported behavior supported each of the three hypotheses.
Reducing the sample size to control for the marital status of parents was just one of the confounding social variables that the scientists accounted for. The study also controlled for gender and race of the child, number of siblings under eighteen years old, family structure, family socioeconomic status, region, locale, and parents’ school involvement. By controlling for these variables, the study attempted to ensure that the changes in behavior were due to changes in the independent variable (religiosity) and not due to differences in the social variables listed above. Controlling for these confounding variables is a good sign that the study’s conclusions about the correlations between religiosity and children’s behavior are accurate. However, the scientists could not account for every confounding variable that might affect children’s behavior. For example, they did not account for the educational status of parents, for whether the grandparents were involved in the children’s lives, or for hundreds of other factors that could play a role in shaping the behavior and development of children. The study’s inability to control for other variables that shape behavior and development raises questions about the validity of their correlational conclusions.
Referenced:
Bartkowski, John P., et al. “Mixed Blessing: The Beneficial and Detrimental Effects of Religion on Child Development among Third-Graders.” MDPI, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 9 Jan. 2019, http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/1/37/htm.
Data/Society/Decision-making Spring 2019 