ABSTRACT
Philosophers have debated how parental values, goals, and attitudes are passed from one generation to the next since the seventeenth century. For example, John Locke (1689) suggested children are born as a blank slate (tabula rasa) on to which parents and society transmit their values and beliefs. Alternatively, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762) argued that children are born with ‘inherent goodness’ and it is up to society to uphold and nurture the qualities that are already present in children. Developmental psychologists have conducted research examining how parents socialize their children — the ways in which parents help children acquire a personal identity, skills, motives, attitudes, and behaviors required for successful adaptation to their society (Arnett, 1995; Maccoby, 1992) — for over 100 years (Spera, 2005).
