"Treat Others Based on How Your Parents Treated You": A Longitudinal Study on Parenting Style Experienced in Adolescence and Prosocial Attitudes Later in Life

The parenting style one grows up with has been found to influence a variety of outcomes later in a person’s life, including prosocial behaviors. However, the attitudes behind these behaviors remained understudied, especially for permissive and uninvolved parenting styles. The present study uses The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), a nationally representative longitudinal dataset conducted in the United States from 1997 to the present year, to clarify the relationship between parenting style experienced in adolescence and prosocial attitudes in early adulthood. Results indicate that being parented with an authoritative parenting style in adolescence leads to higher levels of prosocial attitudes, as well as higher frequency of volunteerism, than other parenting styles. These differences are especially prominent between authoritative and permissive parenting styles. While uninvolved parenting consistently scored lower than authoritative parenting on prosocial attitude measures, many of these differences became marginally significant when demographic variables were controlled for, indicating a nuanced relationship between uninvolved parenting style, sex, race, socioeconomic status, and prosocial attitudes. The present study expands upon the prior research on prosocial behaviors using a nationally representative dataset, while pursuing new and generalizable knowledge in the area of prosocial attitudes, specifically for permissive and uninvolved parenting styles.